Why Has Hermès's Instagram Gone So Odd Lately?

The luxury brands that once won over the last generation of shoppers — what do they have now to catch young people's attention?

Orange light glows inside the store. Two white mannequins stand off to one side in leather jackets from the 2016 fall/winter collection; on the wall behind them hang wide-brimmed hats and leather belts in several colors. The camera suddenly slows as a man in a black suit and round glasses strides past and bites into the green apple in his hand.

This is a 12-second video that Hermès's official Instagram account posted a week ago. The location tag, "Beijing Yintai Center," is one of Hermès's four boutiques in Beijing.

Plenty of commenters thought the video looked cool. But there were also consumers like @thesultedlunatic, who wrote: "I just bought my wife a 35 cm Birkin. It was genuinely hard to get — I had to pick it up in person — but that's also what made buying it for her feel special. The Melbourne store reflects the brand well: dignified, understated, classic. But every time I see these Beijing store promo videos, that feeling fades a little... leave this kind of thing to Walmart's Facebook account."

"Glasses guy eating an apple" isn't the only strangely styled post Hermès has put up on Instagram lately. In another photo, the same bespectacled man carries one of the store's white mannequins horizontally in his arms, showing only its long legs in leather boots, while staring straight into the camera. A rough, phone-shot style with sudden cuts to slow motion has also shown up again and again, in videos of about 10 or 20 seconds each — a leather-gloved hand stroking a horse model in the window of the Barcelona store, say, or a female skateboarder flipping one-handed on a ramp.

QDaily asked Hermès's press office why, and got no direct answer.

In an email interview, the brand said the window display at the Beijing Yintai store was designed to go with "The View from Her," a multimedia exhibition held at the Beijing Minsheng Art Museum on September 20, and that most of the pieces on display were new for fall/winter 2016. It also pointed to another campaign aimed at women, "Hermèsistible," which ran the previous fall/winter.

"With Nadège Vanhee-Cybulski joining Hermès as womenswear artistic director in 2014, we wanted to communicate more about women's ready-to-wear and the world of women."

The reply still sounds thoroughly official. The interesting part is the word "communicate."

Hermès has long come across as a brand that dislikes "direct communication." It has no global marketing department, and puts more of its effort into controlling its products and its channels. Each store tailors its mix to local tastes, so customers find different products in different stores. Some products require signing a waiting list first, and some limited editions can take years to arrive.

That conservative strategy has worked. Even in a year when many luxury brands posted weak results, Hermès kept growing. According to the 2016 half-year report the brand released on September 14, operating income rose 11% in the first half, to 827 million euros, or 33.9% of total sales. Sales in Asia excluding Japan grew 5%; Hong Kong and Macau were turbulent, but mainland China did well.

In its official response, Hermès credited the growth to "pursuing quality" and "pursuing innovation," and to one more thing: "our pace of development has always been fairly steady — we open one or two new stores a year and grow at a measured pace, while also enlarging and renovating existing stores."

On social media, too, Hermès has been more careful than brands like Burberry and Coach, which opened accounts or moved into e-commerce earlier. Hermès opened its Facebook and Instagram accounts in 2010 and 2013; in China it did not open WeChat and Weibo accounts until 2014, and its website still has no way to buy anything.

By statista.com's count in April this year, Hermès's 3.3 million Instagram followers don't even put it in the top ten. The top three are Chanel (11.5 million), Louis Vuitton (10.5 million) and Dior (9.4 million), followed by the likes of Dolce & Gabbana, Gucci, Prada, Michael Kors and Louboutin.

Hermès CEO Axel Dumas made his case for the digital business in a roundabout way in an interview with BoF: "In the 1970s, there was a big debate about whether we should internationalize. At the time people thought you didn't need to at all, because everyone would come to Paris anyway. Going international was expensive and risky. We were lucky to take that step. I think it's the same argument as the one about digital today."

"How should luxury brands use social media" has long been an interesting question with no settled answer. To avoid overexposure and keep a high-end, rare image, luxury brands tend to be cautious, controlling both what they post and where they post it.

Luca Solca, head of luxury goods at Exane BNP Paribas, has pointed out: "Luxury is about selling scarcity — or the illusion of scarcity. Brands that post as frequently as Kors and Valentino punch above their weight, while Balenciaga, Tory Burch, Hermès and Tod's do the opposite."

Yet, surprisingly, some of the oldest luxury houses were among the first to move into social media, and they spent heavily there. Chanel opened a Twitter account back in 2011, and from 2014 Burberry put 60% of its marketing budget into digital media.

James Quarles, Instagram's head of global business and brand development, may have explained part of the reason in an interview with the FT: "The luxury industry is better at managing brands than any marketer in the world. They understand the history, they understand the importance of heritage and craftsmanship, and they understand they have to move with the times when it comes to promotion."

A more important fact: around 2014, when luxury brands were rushing onto social media, some of them also began to slip financially. According to Bain & Company, the global personal luxury goods market reached 224 billion euros in 2014, up 3% from the year before — but Gucci's and Prada's sales fell 1.1% and 1.5% that year, and even Louis Vuitton's reliably strong fashion and leather goods division declined.

The new generation of consumers is not the old one. They prefer ways of dressing that show individual taste and style, rather than the uniform outsized logos of the past. Sarah Quinlan, a market insight researcher at MasterCard Advisors, has also noted that the argument over income inequality has made people reluctant to pick products that flaunt money.

"That's exactly what keeps me up at night. Even people who have money don't want to show it off anymore. If your kid's friend's parents just lost their job, you don't want to buy him a car to drive around." So said Johann Rupert, chairman of Cartier's parent company Richemont, at a business conference.

Meanwhile the customers are getting younger — a point raised again and again in luxury consumption reports over the past five years.

Quarles calls these customers "Henrys": high earning, not rich yet, a new kind of consumer. Instagram's targeting tools already let advertisers single them out as the audience for a campaign.

These consumers long ago formed mobile, digital shopping habits, of course. Even in McKinsey & Company's 2014 survey, 75% of luxury consumers already owned smartphones, and more than 45% said digital media shaped their decisions to buy.

All of which means luxury brands badly need new ways to talk to consumers, instead of speaking, as they once did, only through color spreads in thick fashion magazines, handbags covered in logos, and opulent stores. They need to tell consumers: yes, we have a long history, but we are not your father's or your grandfather's brand — we are a brand that can stand for you.

Luxury brands usually arrived on Instagram later than on Facebook or Twitter. Chanel, for one, opened a Facebook account in 2011 and an Instagram account only in 2014. But now "high engagement" and "strong visual expression" have made Instagram the first choice for luxury brands, and it feels safer than Twitter, which carries more of a public-opinion charge.

According to a report from Exane BNP Paribas, luxury brands' engagement rate on Instagram — likes plus comments — averages 93%, far above 6% on Facebook and 1% on Twitter.

More engagement does not have to mean overexposure. As long as channel control stays tight and the design stays good, that engagement can make a once-unreachable luxury image feel distinctive and real.

In the words of Humberto Leon, founder and creative director of the high-end boutique Opening Ceremony, the platform's virtue is that it "can capture real moments, break down boundaries, and let unique experiences be shared through channels with much broader reach — extending even beyond fashion."

Different brands prove Leon's "distinctiveness" with different techniques. Ninety percent of Louis Vuitton's posts are about new collections or new designs; Chanel's biggest draw is its eminently photographable show sets (the just-finished 2017 spring/summer ready-to-wear show, for instance, turned the Grand Palais in Paris into an enormous data center); and Gucci recently ran a Snapchat campaign called #24HourAce, inviting a dozen or so street artists from different countries and backgrounds to take turns sharing videos and stories they made around the Gucci Ace sneaker.

Hermès's Instagram, by contrast, is less direct, and has long been known for videos that stress artistry and sensation. Its most popular Instagram video of late 2014 was shot in slow motion: a steaming bathtub, the shadows of green plants, a woman with her arms crossed, captioned "a sensual whisper brushing through a private space." That is not quite the deadpan humor of the recent videos, but the intent is similar — let the viewer guess and feel, rather than be told.

Look at this year's just-finished New York and London fashion weeks and Instagram has become all but essential to luxury marketing.

Dolce & Gabbana gave the front-row seats once held by fashion editors and celebrities to "millennials" with more Instagram pull: Swedish singer Zara Larsson (1.9 million followers), model Sarah Snyder (900,000) and "fashion influencer" Luka Sabbat (247,000).

Gigi Hadid and Bella Hadid, sisters with 30 million Instagram followers between them, turned up repeatedly at the shows of MaxMara, Fendi, Versace, Bottega Veneta and Moschino. Bulgari, a 130-year-old jeweler, signed Kate Moss's 18-year-old sister Lottie Moss, who has 74,000 Instagram followers, as its face.

Tommy Hilfiger set aside an "InstaPit" at its spring show this year for social media stars. LVMH opened more than 50 of its workshops to Instagram influencers to tell "the story behind the scenes."

Either way, high-end luxury brands have left the era of the aloof pose and little contact. What they face now may be two entirely new questions: how do you get followers to pay attention to the brand itself, rather than to the influencers and celebrities? And how do you keep consumers of the previous generation, like @thesultedlunatic, once you have changed the way you speak?

Cover image courtesy of Hermès; other images and videos are from Hermès's Instagram, telegraph.co.uk, washingtonpost, vogue, and thechromologist.com.