The Cost Of Digital Visibility For Luxury Fashion Brands

The digital world is increasingly blurring the distinction between visibility and value. Credibility is often determined by likes, while our sense of authority has become distorted to the point that expertise is now judged by how many views something gets. The current digital landscape is built upon systems that reward what we have already recognised as popular, which has diminished the value of having a point of difference. This has resulted in the homogenisation of, well, almost everything, which feels overwhelmingly bland.

How luxury fashion brands navigate this becomes more complicated as the way audiences discover information and products evolves. New and different platforms and channels emerge and fade in importance, challenging existing strategies and budgets. While Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude, are creating a new area of marketing altogether: Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO), also referred to as AI Optimisation (AIO), which focuses on what brands must do to increase their visibility across these platforms too.

The temptation, for many, is to jump at opportunities to be featured, or cited, or replicate formats that seem to do well for others in the hope that success applies to them too. Yet daring to do something differently rejects the same processes repeating and opens up new and original ideas. The result of which widens and expands our collective understanding of what culture, beauty and creativity are and can be. While this may not provide an immediate return, it will deepen a brand's resonance with an audience who value a distinctive approach, rather than becoming indistinguishable amongst another trend.

The Bottega Veneta 'Craft Is Our Language' campaign focused on the roots of the Italian fashion house, the celebration of craftsmanship and its creators. Rolled out digitally alongside celebrity ambassador features, the deliberately pared-back campaign was impactful because it remained deeply aligned to the house codes.

Digital Visibility & Creativity Are Not Mutually Exclusive

For many creatively led brands, the requirements to succeed on each of these platforms can cause tension between teams and strategies, as they are often seen to stifle an idea, or disturb the execution of it, diluting the impact of a campaign in order to make sure it performs well online, however counter-intuitive that may seem.

This is particularly relevant for fashion and luxury brands, where, despite the creative lens through which we understand fashion to be desirable - the allure, the cultural codes, the craftsmanship and exclusivity - collections are still a commercial entity and, to that end, must provide a return. This can drive businesses that do not have endless budgets, or high appetite for risk, to fall back on what they can see, and prove, already works, but this only leads to a reliance on safe, algorithm-approved monotony (i.e. the opposite of creativity).

And yet resisting the temptation to follow only what has been proven to work in the hope of securing visibility – even if ‘success’ is not guaranteed – demonstrates a conviction and authenticity that can create a deeper connection with an audience, while also contributing to the wider culture, which is arguably far more valuable than being swept up in the latest trend.

Szilveszter Makó's popularity is a case in point. Initially praised for its impactful originality, Makó's work created a furore across the fashion world to the point where it has recently featured on covers for the likes of The Cut, Vogue Italia, British Vogue, Vogue Philippines, WSJ Magazine, Elle, to name a few. Yet, in the rush to capitalise on the appeal of his distinctiveness, publications have undermined the very point of difference they were seeking.

An Over-Reliance On Performance Is Not Helping

The emergence of GEO at a time when performance marketing costs are already increasing is raising some valid concerns. These are only exacerbated by fears that traditional SEO - the practice of building the authority and relevance of a website to perform better in search engines such as Google or Bing - is becoming less effective, making organic reach more difficult to achieve too.

For some, this has led to a doubling down on paid budgets to guarantee an immediate return at the cost of other, arguably more long-term oriented, organic marketing channels. For others, a scramble to implement the changes supposedly guaranteed to ‘win’ at GEO before their competitors do. Neither approach leaves much space for brands to create authentically, only commercially, which risks compromising the values that make them desirable in the first place. 

Over time, any excessive focus on short-term performance can reduce a brand's relationship with an audience to a purely transactional one. Constantly optimising marketing channels purely for sales, rather than developing a genuine perspective that users recognise (and appreciate) them for, can result in a shallow and unremarkable brand presence. This lack of distinction is unlikely to withstand competition in today's luxury landscape, and brands risk losing their identity. Prioritising commercial and creative strategies together, even if the return is not instantaneous, creates far more opportunities to build consistency, recognition and a more meaningful connection with its audience.

Luxury fashion brands that are prepared to take risks and approach campaigns distinctively often have a bigger impact. The rule seems to be you have to either do things really well, or differently, to be noticed.

GEO Is Not Reinventing The Wheel (Yet, At Least)

AI systems have been trained on, and still use, existing search results, which means being discoverable in search engines remains hugely valuable, and as I have already outlined here, SEO for luxury fashion brands does not need to be ugly. Moreover, the key principles of Search Engine Optimisation - ensuring your website and its content are discoverable, well-functioning, and that you are a relevant authority to answer a user's search query - remain valuable to humans and AI agents alike.

Content has long sat between being a fundamental part of organic search performance (SEO) and an important tool for brand communication. For all its sins, Google has fought hard against low-quality and insubstantial content for websites seeking easy visibility (just look at the E-E-A-T guidelines and 2022 helpful content update) and this is why a number of AI platforms currently rely on its rankings as a result.

This is to say that writing for humans should be the main priority of any brand content strategy, just as it has been, and this will remain so across all marketing channels as long as humans are the end user. Using a digital channel’s best practices to get in front of an audience comes second.

Strengthen Your Brand’s Integrity & Use Digital PR To Widen Its Reach

As LLMs also look at more than just a brand’s own website, with studies showing how earned media distribution benefits AI visibility through citation lift, digital PR is becoming more important than ever. According to Launchmetrics’ CMO, Alison Bringé, when talking to Vogue Business: “over 80% of what LLMs cite about a brand today traces back to earned media”. 

Incorporating digital PR and using a considered communication strategy to give a brand context, credibility and a presence within wider cultural and industry conversations is now essential for building digital visibility. Brand building, editorial storytelling, SEO and PR work cumulatively to communicate a brand's positioning. Yet their contribution will not always be immediately attributable to one single transaction or conversion. How to manage the risk of underinvesting in the things that do actually create long-term brand value versus immediate return is an important discussion to explore, and is likely to be different for each brand’s own situation.

Ultimately, beneath all of the noise, the core foundations of a marketing strategy in this new digital age actually remain relatively simple: a strong brand position, always, an effective website and owned channels that clearly and accurately communicate this, and a digital PR strategy that places this position within the conversations that matter.

From there, prioritising these foundations avoids a formulaic approach to digital marketing, which, as audiences experience algorithm fatigue, becomes valuable in itself. A digital visibility strategy then becomes more about how to share a brand’s intention and its cultural relevance cohesively across multiple touchpoints, without compromising on what makes it distinctive in the first place.  

The objective should be to ensure that what makes a luxury brand distinctive is understood, recognised and discoverable in ways, and places, that both humans and AI agents can understand, rather than compromising a brand’s ethos in order to fit into the algorithm.

If you are looking to improve your brand’s digital visibility, or would like support with your organic content strategy, please don’t hesitate to reach out.