Digital IQ Index 2011, Greatest Year-Over-Year Gain or Loss, 2010 vs. 2011 Digital IQ Percentile Rank | Source: L2

NEW YORK, United States — On Monday, Professor Scott Galloway’s NYU-based thinktank LuxuryLab, or L2, released advance copies of their third annual “Digital IQ” report, assessing the digital competence of 49 global fashion and leather goods firms, to a small number of media outlets, including BoF.

According to the study, which will be published later today, fashion brands are embracing digital innovation with enthusiasm and have been amongst the first to pilot forward-thinking marketing initiatives on platforms like Foursquare, Tumblr and the fashion flock’s current obsession, photo-sharing app Instagram. “Some programs could best be described as bleeding edge,” says the study, referring to Ralph Lauren’s experimentation with ‘4D’ projection mapping technology.

But a closer reading reveals that a majority of fashion companies — in a sector which trades on being perfectly contemporary and thinks in terms of trend cycles — still regard the rise of digital media as a trend to be exploited, first and foremost, for its PR and image value.

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“When you look at the most popular blogs, each one has a very distinct style and they’re not all the same….even with street style blogs, you know what a Tommy Ton photograph looks like.”

Tavi Gevinson, commenting on the success of her blog Style Rookie at the L2 Innovation Forum, alongside Christene Barberich of Refinery29, Lauren Sherman of Fashionista.com, and BoF’s Imran Amed.

Tavi Gevinson | Source: Style Rookie

NEW YORK, United States — As the Luxury Industry prepares to welcome Generation Y — the largest generation of new consumers since the Baby Boomers — Luxury Lab has just added one Tavi Gevinson to its speaker list for the upcoming Generation Next Forum.

I last heard Tavi speak at the Independent Fashion Bloggers Evolving Influence conference during New York Fashion Week, where she had the entire room enraptured with witty comments, incisive insights and a professional confidence far beyond what one might expect for a 14 year old fashion blogger. Tavi also recently participated in BoF’s global livestream of the Fashion Pioneers interview with Jefferson Hack. Needless to say, at BoF we are all big fans of her Style Rookie blog and the Forum is worth attending just to hear what an extraordinarily smart 14 year old has to say about what brands mean to someone in her generation.

Speaking of brands, this week Luxury Lab also released a new ranking of Gen Y consumers “prestige” brands, measuring the affinity for 105 iconic brands, and the results were eye-opening indeed. According to Scott Galloway, founder of LuxuryLab, “Gen Y goodwill is arguably the closest thing to a crystal ball for predicting a brand’s long-term prospects. Just as Boomers drove the luxury sector for the last 20 years, brands that resonate with Gen Y, whose purchasing power will surpass that of Boomers by 2017, will be the new icons of prestige.”

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LuxuryLab Innovation Forum | Source: LuxuryLab

NEW YORK, United States — On Friday, BoF attended the LuxuryLab Innovation Forum, a half-day conference hosted by Scott Galloway, associate professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business and founder of LuxuryLab, a think tank that attracted attention earlier this autumn with a report ranking luxury brands by their “Digital IQ.”

Billed as TED for the luxury business with “high-velocity presentations,” the forum may have felt a bit unfocused at times, but from the stream of speakers, three important themes emerged.

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Digital IQ Ranking 2009 | Source: LuxuryLab

NEW YORK, United States — In the first-ever ‘Digital IQ’ ranking of the top luxury fashion brands’ digital competence, Louis Vuitton has come out on top, followed closely by Ralph Lauren. Both are ranked as ‘genius’ in the wide-ranging qualitative and quantitative study which covers 109 brands across the luxury spectrum, not just fashion. The study was authored by Scott Galloway, Clinical Associate Professor at NYU’s Stern School and Founder of LuxuryLab, a thinktank with a focus on luxury and new media.

“2009 represented a tipping point concerning the importance of digital competence in the luxury industry,” says Galloway. “While the industry grappled with double-digit revenue declines, traffic to luxury brand sites increased an average of 61 percent. With this study, we’ve devised a metric these companies can use to benchmark specific features of their digital competence against their competitors, and highlight which area each firm stands to gain the greatest return on incremental investment in digital.”

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