For a luxury brand such as Gucci, allowing users to interpret the brand with their images is a commendable step towards embracing their fans and opening up the brand. And Gucci certainly gets points for that. But as a luxury brand, Gucci (and any other) is about exclusivity, integrity, heritage and class. While it may seem that most of social media themes (crowdsourcing, massclusivity, transparency, casual-ness etc.) are diametrically opposite of what luxury brands stand for, the real challenge for luxury brands is going to be to figure out how to interpret these social media themes in the context of their own brand.

@michelle: Totally agree: two clicks too many. They lost me @ which city. I’m from NY originally, but we live in London… chose London. Then what? Yucky music. Too loud. Sunglasses moving around.. reminds me of when networks or other traditional institutions try to blatantly appeal to the ‘youth market’. The BBC kept trying it for a while until it finally realised, hey! We ARE old! We ARE the Establishment, let’s embrace that, and went back to doing great period dramas.

We are all too smart these days. Even if we are children. Or the Youth Market. Everyone can smell insincerity a mile a way. What comes thru, for me, about AOT & the whole Burberry trend in general is that Christopher Bailey, from all accounts, is a talented and very nice, genuine man. He lives a simple lifestyle. He isn’t trying to be cool, which is the only way to be cool. And that, like management in a good restaurant, filters down throughout the brand.

That’s my two cents! ; )

jill @ http://streetstylelondon.blogspot.com/

@polkadot23

@the fashionista: We maintain that Gucci didn’t create a site that elevated and showcased its brand in line with its heritage and brand positioning. Regardless of which product a brand is featuring or which audience it may be going after, preserving the integrity of the overall brand is important. A little bit of editing of the photos would have gone a long way to ensure this.

@Michelle: We agree. Creating a site where users can jump in and participate right away as opposed to having to click…click…click…is definitely more desirable. Websites are not only about aesthetics, but also about functionality.

@B. Waldorf. Thanks for your feedback, which we always appreciate regardless of whether it is positive or negative. To be clear, we didn’t penalise Gucci for jumping on the social media bandwagon (because pretty much every brand has done that this season), but we did feel they could have done so with a little more thought as to how this experiment would impact the perception of their brand over the long-term. And, while the sites are clearly not the same, they are both interactive and nable users to participate and upload photos – so there are some clear similarities. I can see why you say the article does come off as a bit one sited, but indeed so did our Twitter poll! Not one of our readers selected the Gucci Eyeweb site as their favourite (notwithstanding the fact this was not a random sample.)

Overall, we do applaud both brands for taking risks, but in our view (and indeed the view of huge plurality of our readers), AOT was much more successful. Whether they continue to have traction with the site…well that remains to be seen.

I get that they’re both big luxury brands, but essentially one is quintessentially British brand sticking with its very safe and classic heritage and the other is very Italian brand going all out with (literally) flashing lights on it.
Burberry is showcasing it’s star product and Gucci appears to be marketing a new one. Burberry allows users to swap comments and romanticize over their love of THE Mac whereas Gucci give users the 15 minutes of fame their star loving fans desire.

Also, i do feel it’s unfair to accuse Gucci of jumping on the proverbial bandwagon when according to their launch date (broken by WWD if i remember correctly) they infact launched Eyeweb first.

I’m not entirely sure how this became a comparative debate anyway?
Where’s the comparing of Burberry showing it’s A/W ’10 show and DG placing Bryanboy on the front row to live blog theirs? There’s different ways of embracing the ‘new’ found tech to very traditionally protective (and risk taking) brands – i say applaud them both for taking the chance and investing in what is always a very under appreciated area to risk budget.

They’ll both learn that neither of their sites were particularly spot on and develop from there.

Rome was not built in a day!

Alistair Allan’s comment is quite right, no doubt the BBH-developed Art of the Trench almost certainly had a bigger budget and more time than Safilo’s Eye Web. Is that any excuse though?

Well, the brands and intended audiences would seem to be very different. I sensed no comprehension of the youth audience that loves Gucci, how these club kids are very different to the more mature trench wearing urbanites…

Both ideas are cool, I mean come on, to see oneself reflected in the lenses of the latest Gucci shades is sweet… perhaps I’m just a bit younger than some of the people who contributed to the original article…

I’m yet to meet someone who doesn’t think Scott Schulman’s photography is amazing. Maybe some of the images on Eye Web just isn’t as ‘fashion-y’ a bit too real-world. Power to Gucci for letting real people project themselves onto their brand.

As for the stuff about too many clicks? Wow. How boring. To be honest I’m not really counting how many clicks I make when I’m online I’m just getting on with it… splash screens = downloading… that’s the way the web works isn’t it? I’m not a techy though (thank god).

Shame Gucci didn’t spend on cooler music. I would have thought Frida G with all her contacts could have pulled something out….

In the end I think it’s great that both fashion houses are experimenting and that they probably have both learned a lot from it. People who’re critiquing this activity without actually producing work as well should put a sock it in (a Gucci or Prorsum design will work equally well)…

Launching with Super-Blogger Scott Schuman was a good move, but no doubt expensive. Developing this site took months and probably a fair sum of money (along with Mr Schumans fees) but a well executed social media marketing exercise shouldn’t require a large spend.

I don’t see any real benefit for users to entice them to return regularly. Street style sites maintain traffic because they are frequent and diverse, this is all about a single product. In the short term it might seem like a exciting, but I think it might very quickly become repetitive.

Regarding the stats , “Pageviews” is not easily measured as this site is all Flash, the boundry of what defines a “Page” is not easily measured and could be measured in ways to seem attractive.

A real measure on it’s success would be a combination of the sites traffic growth rate, avg time on site, returning visitors, as well cost per visit.