Bottega Veneta and the reinvention of brand apps

The return to the scene of Bottega Veneta in Milan, with the debut of Matthieu Blazy after the sensational and mysterious divorce from Daniel Lee, is perhaps one of the most anticipated events of Milan Fashion Week that begins today. For the occasion, the brand presented a new app simply called Bottega Veneta through which the green parakeet synonymous with the brand present in various installations around Milan is transformed into a green screen on which images of the debut campaign of the new creative director appear. This «doorway into the world of the brand» will appear «wherever the green is» transforming the app into a sort of unofficial augmented reality visor but without making it a library of content or services – and therefore differentiating it from the rest of the brand apps seen so far. Without returning to social media (territory defended by the faithful @newbottega) the new Bottega Veneta app offers a pure experience and is not a simple version of the brand's website available for smartphones. A transversal approach to digital that has found its reflection, from the diametrically opposite side of the communicative spectrum, in the relaunch of Butt Magazine promoted by the magazine last week. 

The app will be used in three days for the matthieu Blazy show livestream and, later, could presumably become the brand's regularly updated channel of preference with «new content, features and functionalities». The point of the matter, however, regardless of how the app changes in the future, is that Bottega Veneta will continue its unconventional and mono-channel communication strategy even in the era of Matthieu Blazy and that this new brand app format, if successful, could be replicated by others in the future. To date, the most developed, sophisticated and interesting brand app is that of Gucci – in effect an online extension of the brand's digital ecosystem. On this app, users can do everything from Arcade games to boutique localization, through the use of augmented reality to make objects from the brand's Decòr line appear in their home and virtual try-ons. It is an app designed to spend time in the world of the brand, which is much more expansive and branched than that of Bottega Veneta, and whose model the Blazy brand does not want to imitate – as explained by CEO Leo Rongone in a recent interview, Bottega is «an inclusive brand with an exclusive product» and wants to move in a way that is simply different from the others.

If the patronage and the intellectual approach of Bottega Veneta are expressed through the concrete, collectible and historical Butt Magazine; its digital approach is expressed through this app, but it preferred a fluid approach to digital communication and not an iOS translation of the brand's website. The key to everything is experience: as the online luxury industry is typifying its communicative ways, its ways of presenting content, its codes and its conventions, but often ending up creating a false sense of artificiality and institutional rigidity, brands that want to break the convention rely on creating an experience that involves users on a deeper level than a simple like and therefore activating mechanisms other than the purely "visual" ones of campaigns, exhibitions, alliances with celebrities. It is an organic way of communicating, albeit indirect, and in any case innovative and stimulating compared to the paradigm that many other brands have adopted so far – a paradigm that already shows its age and its ailments in the hyper-rapid and creative world of TikTok and that will soon become obsolete even for the real world.