Gucci Case Study

SWOT

Gucci has been working for years to commit and become a progress leader in terms of social responsibility, during which they did lots of significant actions to practice their commitment to people, environment, culture and philanthropy. However, there are still many scandals leaks out time to time: instore staffs suffered from miscarriage in 2011; Long working hours of labor in 2014; “Unhealthy thin model” of Gucci in 2016. These clearly point out the inconsistency between their words and actions, thus Gucci is suspected of conducting greenwashing.

Apart from internal weaknesses, there are several external threats that are coming up and may shake up Gucci. For instance, social norm are changing, new generation and current customers are putting more emphasis on CSR and Gucci may face some biophysical limits regarding raw material sourcing. Nevertheless, I believe that Gucci can turn this change of customers’ preference and purchasing behaviors into opportunities by implementing the marketing strategies below.

Marketing Plan

There is raising middle class around the globe meaning a higher purchasing power of consumers and more crazy consumption towards luxury brands, including Gucci. While Gucci is now in emergent sustainability orientation, since their sustainability culture is highly emphasized in some departments only and resulting in identity conflict. Therefore, Gucci have to revise their marketing strategies and maintain sustainability; otherwise, increasing consumptions of luxury goods may result in environmental damage and exploitation of human rights.

Place

Although, Gucci always claim to protect all workers, human rights and the enhancement of the supply chain, there are still lots of related scandals popping up continuously. It is understandable that there are numerous workers and long supply chain distributed globally and it is hard to monitor all of them. Therefore, in order to solve this problem thoroughly, Gucci can adopt more high-tech or digital devices to streamline the operation and reduce the workload of workers. For example, Gucci can install “Smart” fitting rooms like Macy’s. Macy placed iPads and chutes inside the changing room, enabling shoppers to request and receive different sizes or colors automatically. In addition, a “discard” chute facilitates returning products they do not wish to purchase. Advanced technologies can ease some of the job duties of Gucci sales staffs, their workload is reduced and working condition improved, which can resolve the root cause of long hours shift without rest time for staffs.

Product

Currently, most of the luxury brands tend to produce their products with wool, fur and leather to achieve a higher added value, which heavily increase the demand for their raw material likes cow, sheep and other animal husbandry. According to the documentary video that we watched in class, it is clearly states that raising livestock is unsustainable, leading to more greenhouse gas emissions and deforestation. As reported by Greenpeace, presently around 290m cows are killed every year and projection indicates that the industry needs to slaughter 430m cows annually by 2025 in order to satisfy leather goods consumption demand.