Transcript - Luca Marchetti
Season 3, Episode 12
Conversation with Luca Marchetti, Senior Lecturer, IFM & Sorbonne Nouvelle
Joshua Williams: Retail Revolution, a unique podcast that features in-depth conversations with guest experts in omni-channel retailing with myriad perspectives:. Technology, consumer engagement, data analytics, merchandising, and more. We pay special attention to current sociopolitical issues and challenges and their implications on fashion retail as well as opportunities to innovate and rethink retail's future.
Visit RetailrRevolutionPodcast.com for more information, including full transcripts. And follow us on Instagram and LinkedIn @retailrevolutionpodcast. Retail Revolution is produced by Joshua Williams and hosted by Christopher Lacy. Both are assistant professors in the Fashion Management graduate program at Parsons School of Design.
Christopher Lacy: Hello, welcome to Retail Revolution podcast. And today we have a very special guest, Luca Marchetti, trained in semiotics at the University of Bologna and in applied semiotics at the University of Limoges. He now works internationally as a consultant in branding, market research, and intercultural analysis. We're very fortunate to have him with us today, as we talk about the importance of culture and the role it will play with engaging brands and customers for better retail compliances.
Luca welcome to Retail Revolution. Thank you for joining us today.
Luca Marchetti: Thank you for inviting me.
Christopher Lacy: Luca, you have such an interesting career. As a matter of fact, one of our students last year, focused a lot of what she wanted to do and her thesis on you. So, I would love for you to tell our listeners about yourself and your career.
Luca Marchetti: Okay, I'll try to make it short. Well, I was born in Italy. I'm Italian. And I moved to Paris later, basically to finish my study program and I started in Bologna at the University of Bologna, in a particular moment. At that time, Umberto Eco, or who is mostly known for being a novelist, but he also was a major semiotician, expert in semiotics and semiology.
Well, at the time he was directing the communication department at the university. And this is where I started to look at pop culture, fashion, brands and design from a technical perspective, analyzing, you know, pop culture phenomenon. So, I got more and more interested into semiotics and applied semiotics as a way to understand a little bit more of the fashion and design, which were already my interests at the time.
I finished my program, my study program in Paris doing research and writing my first degree thesis. And this is where I started to work for brands leveraging the fact that I was probably in one of the most interesting places in the world to see what fashion is about and how things work in fashion.
Later, when I was already working for brands and agencies working with brands, I started to be involved in activities of exhibition curation. So, I started to organize and co-organize exhibitions on fashion, for brands and also for public purposes with museums and other institutions. And this allowed me to understand that the pivotal role that space plays when you need or want to express your discourse in a more convincing embodied and proper way.
And this was the last, the only link I missed to merge my interest in brands with my upcoming interest in the retail space; expressing a brands discourse, brands identity, and a brand strategy through space. And I started working on retail spaces. And then also teaching skills and techniques to understand and to conceive also retail spaces and brand spaces.
More recently and this is the last step of my professional path. I decided to create an agency called The Perspectivists with three colleagues I've been working with for quite a long time now, more or less 10 years. To do what? To do what we call in France, analyse prospective. So, foresight, social / cultural foresight, and prospective scenarios. Prospective scenario design, what will be the future of, and then add what you would like to be informed about the future of femininity, the future of mobility, the future of masculinity, luxury and whatever else. And we work with, um, an experienced designer, delivering our findings, how our results through experiential scenarios, which is a very, very new thing to me. Which is extremely interesting. I never thought before that it could deliver my thinking in this very convincing way and very consistent format.
That's it, I guess!
Christopher Lacy: You say it like it's, you know, just what you do on an average day.
I understand what you do is something far more scientific than what I spent my career doing.
Luca Marchetti: Hmhm.
Christopher Lacy: I got into retail and customer experience design, because I liked to understand why people did what they did and how they engaged with product and a brand. And why did they buy the items they bought. One of the things I'm wondering, based on what you said that your company can do, is answering a question that an organization or brand would have.
And you mentioned something really cool, which is, if they want to understand femininity, or they want to understand masculinity. Right now, there is a huge shift with the younger consumer and gender neutrality. I'd love your thoughts on how do you think we're going to start viewing femininity and masculinity in the future and by future, I mean, honestly, within the next year, even? Is this going to be something that should be a top of mind for brands?
Luca Marchetti: Yes, absolutely. Well, we could say thousands of things about this topic; it's a hot topic. We see how much is going on in the media and in society about gender identity, the representation of gender identity, the rights of these other community, et cetera, et cetera.
It is very important for brands to understand the very thin boundary--and this is my own personal perspective, but the very thin boundary between the imaginary of femininity and masculinity, and the behaviors. What I see, just to mention one thing, which really intrigued me a lot, what I see is that brands don't understand that it's not because their audience is gender fluid, more gay or more lesbian or more transgender, et cetera. That these scores should evolve because so often I'm told well, but our audience is very, very conservative, is very classic, is it "normal," it makes me laugh. And all this is not for us. When you look about what the younger audience is doing and thinking and expressing, is that whenever their sexual or identitarian behavior is absolutely unchanged compared to one other parents, or a close community of friends and family, that imaginary needs to cope with these topics, these subjects, these ideas.
Just to give you an example, the gender fluidity and all the nonbinary culture that is now visible in TV series and so many other media productions, is very important for the teenagers and the young adults to express the permanent mutability and mutation of their body and their identity in a very particular phase of their lives. Characters, personality, the mood and the body, physically speaking, change a lot during this moment.
And it's much easier or more rewarding for them to identify with a fluid image of the being, then a binary one. Which is not exactly something which describes their pragmatic behaviors in their life. It is something that brand not so often understand, while they should, because their discourse is what represents, what they call here, the imaginary of their audience, their discourse, their storytelling.
Christopher Lacy: This is great because when we talk about brands and storytelling and every brand, I know I've talked to, you've talked to, any of us have talked to, they're always like "we want to engage with the customer better; we have omni-channel strategies. We have all these things." And, what you've just highlighted is brands have almost a difficult time connecting with the customer because they have their own vision of what they think the customer is. And so, oftentimes this assumption is incorrect.
There are more cultural shifts at play, as we all know, than what we just talked about, which is gender neutrality. If you were to look at the cultural shifts as a whole, that you see going on right now, how can brands better engage with customers across, these channels, brick and mortar, they're digital, to really make this, and I'm going to say the word that said so often, authentic engagement, when cultural shifts are at play?
Luca Marchetti: A major change, in terms of cultural shift, is the increasing importance that affection and what we also in marketing call purpose is taken. These aspects of our culture, of contemporary culture, of course, there are differences, according to very different markets and regions in the world, et cetera, but in a general way, from a global perspective, we can see that affection and the idea, the notion of purpose are becoming pivotal. Which means that culture and cultural points of view make the difference.
We don't buy something because we need this, of course. We don't buy something because it's beautiful, new, appealing, et cetera. But we buy something in particular. And more and more, if we think of a younger population, the younger customer population, because it expresses something we believe in. And among the 10, 100, 1000 products, we could choose having the same function and feeling the same space, you know in our life, the ones who express a purpose - driven vision we can share, will be the preferred ones. So, in other terms, culture and the cultural point of view of brands and customer used to be a contextual factor and is little by little becoming the factor.
Christopher Lacy: So, when we think about these shifts and culture, it's hard not to think about and recognize social movements that are occurring, especially in the U.S.
Luca Marchetti: Hmhm.
Christopher Lacy: And when that word authentic is used, how do you contextualize this appropriately thinking about social movements, this change in culture, how it's impacted the customers in the US? How is this going to impact how brands engage in other parts of the world? Because a lot of what happens in the U.S. can be felt globally. And I think we've seen, you know, what happened over the summer, how much this movement impacted globally. How will this affect brands and customer engagement in Italy and in France, across those areas?
Well, Italy and France are two different contexts. Europe is quite small compared to the U.S. or China, or other bigger countries. But what is particular to Europe is that the differences are very locally rooted in a very small space you can find major differences between, two neighbor cultures.
But France and Italy normally look at the US and the social phenomenon happening there as a representation of what could happen here. I say here for France and there for Italy because I'm based in Paris. The US are a sort of magnifying glass for France and for Italy, allowing to see on a bigger scale and at a higher intensity, what could happen in Europe and France and Italy, in particular.
First thing, this allows the local populations and the local powers and also the local brains to be confronted with the same things and pre find solutions in case this phenomenon should happen here as well. But more interesting for me, this also stimulates the acceleration of similar social trends in these local cultures. Something which is, for example, latent in Italy or France could be enhanced, accelerated, in its development because we see it represented in this real-life storytelling we receive from the US. It was like this for me too, the shock of what was happening in the US; the surprise lasted, I don't know, for five minutes before discovering that here as well, it was a major problem. And the French, #MeToo, happened just a couple of months later. Maybe it could have took a couple of years to develop, locally without this heavy, massive stimulation coming from what we were seeing about the #MeToo movement in the US. At the time I was in Canada. I spent a couple of years in Canada before coming back one year ago.
And it was very interesting to see how Canada reacted immediately, immediately on the #MeToo movement, denouncing and explicitly stating what was implicit. And I was in Quebec. So, a Francophone region of Canada. But the physical proximity produced a much higher identification between the Canadians and the Americans. It was a little bit slower from France because the cultural proximity is lesser, is less strong. There is a physical distance which translates, of course, into a geographical distance. And we took this phenomenon as a representation of what could happen initially.
It brings up, a thought to me, which is, so 92% of luxury brands are European based. Even after the talk of this movement happened in the US; we still saw certain brands do terrible ad campaigns without thinking appropriately. And there was this thought of, are they numb to it? Like, do they not understand it? And I always went, why is it so difficult for, luxury European brands to kind of really understand the pain and hurt that goes along with some imagery amongst cultures. Cause it sometimes seems like it falls on deaf ears. And I just want to know, like, do you have any thoughts about it as you, kind of, you're there in that space and also studying culture?
Luca Marchetti: Yeah, your question triggers at least two things to me. First of all, what I mean changing takes time takes know-how. You need to know how to do it, especially when things happen rapidly, fast, when things go fast. And it takes money. And on a global market, you can still rely on a consistent part of the customer population granting the success of your brand, even if you're brand doesn't move, doesn't change in terms of codes, expression, and more generally discourse.
I was reading statistics a couple of days ago about the growth of many French luxury brands. They have very hard time selling in Europe, but due to the fact that the Far East markets are starting again, in a very enthusiastic way, they are granting the plus 12% on the 13% they expected. So, the loss is very weak. There was almost no loss.
Christopher Lacy: Right.
Luca Marchetti: So, why change it? Why in this period, so unstable and blah, blah, blah, taking the risk of doing things fast now, and change. You can still survive, thanks to this part of the customer population. This is one of the reasons, I think about.
Then, luxury is like, it’s a very interesting topic to, to observe, very interesting phenomenon to observe, cultural phenomenon to observe, because it's in a very, big part of it is immaterial, it's a matter of imaginary of images, production, storytelling, and so on. Part of it, it's about products, of course, of services, et cetera, but much of it is about storytelling. And this kind of storytelling, this kind of imaginary, as a typical product is; we take a very banal, example: it will be much less desirable to buy Chinese, Indian, or American mozzarella, even if it's perfectly done. Honestly, the first time I went to Japan, I drank the best coffee ever. I am Italian and I know coffee in Naples. But I arrived in Tokyo and I was like, "Oh wow, what's happening here. It's not possible." And cappuccino was the same, but when you think, "Oh, I want to cappuccino" you don't think I would like to go to talk to you in that wonderful cafe and...no you prefer to be in Milan, at Cova's, and having your Cova cappuccino, because it's typical because there is an imaginary, which is evoked by the gesture, by this kind of consumption, by the moment and the place. Luxury is the same. So, not only products in luxury are typical, let's think of champagne or so many other protected products, not only products are typical, but also the storytelling is more desirable when it relies on historically European and conservative codes. In these codes, transparency, inclusivity, diversity, fluidity were not options.
So, now we, and when I say we, I say in a very personal way, because we, as The Perspectivists, and experts in general, we have to find a way to express the right idea with some way old codes or using new codes to express old ideas, in order to create a link. And this is something which is going to change little by little, in parallel and with the social situation and the social changes, codes change with time and with space, of course, what is relevant here is not necessarily relevant there, or what is relevant today is not necessarily relevant tomorrow.
Christopher Lacy: You gave the example of your coffee and Tokyo.
Luca Marchetti: Yeah.
Christopher Lacy: It made me think of much of what we like to do, it's not necessarily about the product. It's just about the ambiance and the feeling of it and what it means. And a lot of what we do, why we like to do it, is based on the culture that we are engaged with. You know, I love going to Spain because I love Spanish culture and I love being there. I love traveling to any part of the world because I want to experience that culture. And there are moments I think everyone who travels, you understand that. And you respect it and you want to celebrate it. I want to ask you, because I'm using this word celebrate because I'm going to go back a bit, which is there is this idea that fashion says that they are celebrating cultures.
Luca Marchetti: Hmhm.
Christopher Lacy: The consumer side, say no, you're appropriating this culture. And I want to discuss with you the difference between cultural appropriation and cultural celebration. And why has this been such a challenge for the fashion industry when it's really so easy to describe as you did with describing your experience in Tokyo, and why you enjoyed that experience and why it gave you something different.
And, and to me, I think that's celebrating their culture and how they did something that is so classic to the Italian culture. But what is that difference? Appropriation and celebration?
Luca Marchetti: It's a very slippery ground these times. Well, I personally, I think I have a very, discussable, debatable position.
I think that, at least theoretically speaking in absolute terms, cultural appropriation just does not exist. It doesn't exist. I also think that it shouldn't exist because, I see very clearly that the same discourse, pronounced, annunciated by different communities can have opposite results, opposite outputs, which means opposite meanings, significations, implications. But the discourse is the same. So, the kind of sign you use, the kind of color, image, product you exhibit is the same, first thing.
Second thing, in the public space, you have the right of being interested, intrigued, seduced, inspired by this, or that other, cultural influence. So, to cut it short, from a theoretical point of view, appropriation is just nonsense about cultures.
Then, we don't live in a theoretical world. We don't live in an absolute world. We live in a relative world. So, things happen for real people in real cultural contexts. And we have to take into account that this, or that other discourse, this or that other sign, when annunciated, can irritate the sensibility of a person, a bigger or a smaller community. And this is part of the game.
So, if this thing we call cultural appropriation now, means that a specific cultural discourse cannot be accepted when coming from a particular part of the population, or some individuals, we have to find a solution to produce the transition to a newer situation happening, I hope tomorrow, happening I hope very soon, in which everyone can be properly represented, respected, and every discourse can be considered legitimate in itself. Not because it's pronounced or initiated by that or other community.
But this is not our present. Our present is a time in which specific discourses, specific storytellings, are deeply rooted in historical context, cultural context, which produced disasters in cultural and social terms.
So, you have to take into account that in this moment, that injuries are very delicate, that injuries are open, eh? And we have to work to find cultural solutions in order to produce this transition.
Christopher Lacy: I think one of the easiest ways to be able to do that is making sure that there's appropriate representation. Right? You know, to your point is, everyone is legitimate. And the narrative and the feeling and the realness of the feeling of cultural appropriation that happens, would definitely be subdued if there were representation of more cultures consistent. Right? So, then you're, able to kind of remove the negative feeling because everyone is legitimate. And so that's true cultural celebration to me, is when I see representation of that culture. And that's something the fashion industry really needs to get on top of. That I don't think is difficult.
Luca Marchetti: Yeah.
Christopher Lacy: I think that's something that that's just like an "I don't want to" or "I want to".
Luca Marchetti: Yeah, absolutely.
Christopher Lacy: So, you know, I do want to ask you this question as we wrap up, because this is something that I think about often just, looking at how people engage with each other. And, now hearing museums are closing, you know, as a result of COVID because they can't keep going. And I wonder, have we become a society that no longer appreciates the intersectionality of art, of fashion and culture? And I'm asking you that in the sense of right now, I feel like every brand pretty much just looks the same. Like you could see the same thing. Everyone is about an athleisure kind of feel. I mean, you could see that in everyone's assortment. And I just want to know your thoughts on it. I remember the days of avant-gardeness. And I feel like that's missing sometimes. And what are your thoughts on it with our society, what's going on?
Luca Marchetti: Okay. First of all, but let me start on, on a few, few remarks, in the defense of brands. We have more and more brands.
Christopher Lacy: Right.
Luca Marchetti: The market is more and more populated. So, when I teach to do it through clear examples, I quote Mademoiselle Chanel with Picasso, Stravinsky and so on. Well, it was easy at the time. Fifty haute couture or luxury brands in the world. It was not that hard to be singular and to have a specific discourse, image and perspective on the arts. The audience was much more coherent as well, and compact. Who bought Chanel? People with money and education.
So, it was easier to let a radical, artistic discourse understood. Then things change little by little. Today we have thousands of brands in the luxury market, and in the market in general, even more. But there is also, a second aspect, which is more specific to contemporary times. Personally, because it's my job and so, I can be called an expert. I look for specific examples, specific communication examples all the time. And I see that so much is going on with brands and artists; with performers, artists, and brands in so many formats, in so many ways. But is not exactly visible through the same channel compared to what was happening, I don't know, four or five decades ago, brands had two things to express their identity, an imaginary: the original space and printed ad campaigns. Stop. Videos were not an option. The fashion shows were not on TV and not on the web. We had no web at all. But today, if you look what, I don't know, Burberry does for fashion show on Twitch, if you look for what they do on Instagram, look at what Chanel does for specific events, what Hermes does at the Grand Palais for the Hermes big annual event, what they do for Christmas at the Galerie du Temple, and then with the Bon Marche, at another moment of the year, there are great experiences and great initiatives.
Not exactly visible. And not everyone does the same, of course, not everyone has the same perspective. And I'm quoting these brands without thinking cleverly about what they have done in details, when and how frequently. So, I'm just trying to find clear examples for, for everyone. What I see, which is changing a lot is that the use of art is very often superficial and used as a matter of communication, something which is liable to attract people's attention through renewed and renewable aesthetic codes, which is not exactly the good thing to do from my perspective. What I really see happening in interesting terms is when the brand understands that for the younger customer population, what art can add to the brand's point of view is the experiential and the sensorial dimension that the printed communication or the social network cannot provide. Because this population receives the message in a sensorial way, in an experiential way. They, let me say, pay for the experience and the sensorial stimuli. It's not just something contextual, which is important, to sell the product. In so many cases, it is the product. So, being involved in a performance with a choreographer, an artist, and the brand is something they can buy. I'm sure that we will have cinema productions by a luxury brand very soon; a luxury Netflix from a brand or a group. It's not something that far from our present. And there we could buy and pay for experiential contents, which also can happen physically.
And so, what about, the pandemic and blah, blah, blah; now we cannot go into spaces as we would like to. It's totally coherent with what was already happening before the terrible Corona thing, going less and less in spaces, but going in brand spaces, to retail spaces, as I don't know, destinations, or monuments, in specific moments with specific people; maybe queuing to get in and spending a long time there, after that, to receive a specific piece of experience; singular from that brand and that audience in that part of the city, that part of the globe, sometimes, for a very limited period of time in the year, the pop-up stores phenomenon and so on; it was already happening. So, now the fact that we can have, I don't know, spaces in which, three, four, five people are allowed and not 500, is not contradictory with retail phenomena already latent before the pandemic. I'm not saying that everything was already there, but a lot of what's happening now was already there. And now there is the necessity, the obligation, to jump into it, but it was happening already.
Christopher Lacy: Oh, my gosh. I wish I had more time for us to discuss what you just unpacked there, you know, that would be great. So, we might have to have you come back for this one Luca.
You're doing some amazing things. And I want you to have the opportunity to tell our listeners how to stay up to date with what you're doing. So, how can they connect with you, hear about it, engage with it.
Luca Marchetti: Yes. I mentioned the agency I work in and I co-founded with my three colleagues, The Prospectivists. It has a website, which is www.theperspectivists.com and people can find, a consistent amount of information about what we do and how we do it. For my personal activities, I have a LinkedIn page, quite well updated with what I do, what I am interested in.
And I also wrote a couple of things, a recent book merging the curatorial approach to fashion with the skills and the curatorial approach needed to conceive retail spaces. The book is called, Exhibit and it is available on many, many yeah. web retailers and at bookrepublic.it in particular. But also, on Amazon.
Christopher Lacy: All right. Fantastic, I guess that's what I'm picking up today. This was a great conversation. I am so glad we were able to make it work out for you to come and speak with us about culture and retail. I have no doubt we'll need to have you back again because culture is ever changing.
And I hope you have a great rest of the day Luca. Thank you.
Luca Marchetti: Thank you very much. See you soon I hope, hear you soon, I hope. Thank you.
Joshua Williams: Thank you for listening to this episode of Retail Revolution, a very special thank you to everyone who has helped make this podcast possible. If you'd like to support the work we're doing, please visit our show page at retailrevolutionpodcast.com and click on the donate link. Our theme music was composed by Spencer Powell.
Be well and stay tuned for our next episode.
