Atmosphere...atmosphere...est-ce que j'ai une gueule d'atmosphere ?

• The title of this article is a famous word said by Arletti in the French movie "Hotel du Nord".
  One of the difficulty of the luxury online Web site is to make the customer feel the atmosphere of the brand. I will explain you how to create the atmosphere of luxury online and the limit of it.
  
  First of all, you need to understand that browsing a web site cannot be like visiting a store. The Internet will never, or at least until we reach another level of technology, be in competition with the store in terms of feelings. Why ? because when you enter a store all your 5 senses are stroke:
  
  1. Your eyes by the beauty of the store and the product displayed,
  2. Your ears by a delicious and smooth melody,
  3. The touch when you carry the handle of your dreaming bag or when you feel the gentle texture of a cashmere cardiggan.
  4. Even your noise is in contribution thanks to the odor broadcaster which are hidden every where and make you feel the smell of the tanned leather.
  5. And, if you are an important customer, they offer you a little glass of Champagne, so even the taste is in contribution.
  Each brand in a store will use those 5 senses to give you the feeling of something unique, their DNA which is different from their competitor.
  
  How to make the people feel the same on line ?
  Again, it is not possible because we have only 2 senses which can be used in front of a screen: the eyes and the ears. So, needless to say that you will not make the customer feel like in a store.
  BUT you can make him feel watching a luxury web site in comparison with a "middle brand" web site, like you make him feel being in a luxury store in the physical world and not in a "supermarket".
  What does matter here is the comparison. Luxury is at the top of what exists and so it has to be on the Web as well.
  Luxury must create its standard on the Web , as it has created his own standard on the physical world, using the best architects and the best location in the street for its stores.
  
  How to do it ?
  First of all, like in real stores there are some rules to follow not to lose (and upset) your customers. It is the ergonomy of your Web site, and as in a physical store some standards must be followed:
  Put your key elements on the center of the page. For the other ones, some area of a screen are less see than other ones: the bottom in general and especially the bottom left etc.
  Use explicit titles: even if you are here to make people dream, use the dream into your animation or the visual you will use not in the title to go to it. Like in the real life, people will not open a door and lose their time if they are not sure of what they will find.
  Use short titles: people read in a different way on the internet. They read the title and the first 2 lines of the article. And if the content seems interesting, then they will continue to read. So do not hesitate to make a summary of your article in the first 2 lines.
  Becareful of the downloading time. On luxury web sites, we need to have beautiful images and videos which are heavy to download. Here, we recommand that you use technical tricks to make the user experience good enough:
  
• give an order to the downloading of all the elements of the page: customer will start to read them while the heaviest ones are downloaded. They will not have the impression that it is long: remember that there is not the perfect downloading time. Only the impression of the downloading time of the websurfers matters. You can have a page which takes 20 secondes to be completely downoaded and the Websurfer will consider it fast because he will start to read something at the first second. In the opposite you can have a downloading time of your page of 10 seconds and people will consider it as very heavy because they will see all the page at once after 10 seconds.
• use Akamai technology. Akamai is a Company which has thousands of servers all around the globe and cach the pictures and videos (the static elements) of your Website on all its servers. Each time you connect to a site, you connect on the closest Akamai server of your home/office and you need less time.

Once you have respected some basic ergonomic rules, then you need to make the difference with the other Web sites. How ? the answer is easy but could be hard to manage: make a graphical chart and use very qualitative visuals or video. The basis of a graphical chart is easy to make, usually each brand has a dominant color in its stores or advertising etc. It can be the color of the moment, usually used to create a mental link between all the advertising visuals of the brand (like Kenzo) or a more permanent color like dark brown for LV, red for Cartier etc. After it is more complex to include in the Graphical Chart Visual Merchandising rules: visual product associations for instance.
For the use of very qualitative images and videos the issue is that it is expensive to make because you need to have a great (and expensive) photographer or movie maker. You have 2 solutions:
You use what you have created for other purpose: off line advertising, brochures, catalogs, press release...
You have not enough materials or it shows only product you do not sell online (which is often the case) and you need to create them especially for the Web. And here it is expensive, as expensive as could be the shot of a photo for a brochure an online advertising etc.

But you do not have other choice: having cheap picture, photo or video on its Website will have a bad impact of your Brand, on the Web but also on the physical world.
52% of the Brick & Mortar buyers go on the Web site of the Brand before buying. You need to have this figure in mind before putting any bad picture on your Web site.

It is better to have a Web site which is not update too often and have great pictures/photos/videos than to update your Website every week and have a bad result. The average visit frequency rate is one visit every 2 months. It is a lot when you compare with the average purchase rate: one every year and a half.

For sure, if you manage to have beautiful pictures/animations/videos on your Web site you will manage to re-create an eluxury atmosphere on your Web site, it will not be the same as in a physical store but it will be luxury in comparison of what is done on the online world.