Luxury goods businesses need to respond to current uncertainty by successfully navigating the present reality, while also planning for and successfully shaping the future recovery.
That’s clearly a tall order – especially at a time when these businesses must deal with an increased cybersecurity threat landscape. Whether it’s billing fraud, ransomware or data theft, luxury businesses face the same challenges as companies in other sectors.
Luxury sector challenges
At the same time, there are some unique challenges the luxury sector faces. The greater value of typical transactions within the luxury space means there’s greater scope for significant losses, while also making these brands a more appealing target for counterfeiters.
Also, the luxury sector generates a significant proportion of its revenue – around 30% – from consumers making purchases outside their home countries. At a time when the pandemic has significantly reduced international travel, a major source of revenue for luxury businesses is at risk.
These brands will need to invest heavily in their digital offering and shift their media spend to online channels, placing more emphasis on acquiring customers than brand building. This should aim to boost digital transactions, while also building a desire to visit physical stores once it becomes safe to travel.
Alongside enhancing their own websites, luxury brands should identify credible e-commerce partners to maximize their digital potential. This must be combined with smart personalization – which relies on consumers trusting brands with their data and is therefore also related to cybersecurity.
With luxury consumers accustomed to a high standard of service in stores, these brands will need to create a smart, personalized digital experience to meet high expectations.
Ultimately, the ROI offered by cybersecurity is not simply through the reduced risk of financial losses, but also the enhanced potential digital experience brands can offer.
The danger of the wrong solution
Not all cybersecurity solutions are created equal, however. As a result, luxury businesses are in danger of suffering a breach through using a tool that hasn’t been designed to meet specific retail security needs.
In order to properly mitigate security threats, these brands need solutions that guard against attacks originating on the deep and dark web. Whether it’s domain spoofing, fake social media profiles, fake branded products or fake gift card numbers sold on the dark web, there are range of sector-specific cyber risks that can lead to financial losses and diminished brand trust.
Stefanini’s Threat Intelligence provides companies with unparalleled expertise in Digital Brand Protection. Contact us, and let’s enhance cybersecurity and help secure your business.
Addressing the threat – calculating the ROI
In order to properly guard against these dangers, luxury brands must begin by getting clear on the high-level benefits offered by external threat intelligence, including operationally, tactically and strategically.
Operational benefits will enhance speed and efficiency when it comes to analysts’ day-to-day work, while tactical benefits will offer a reduce risk level, through more effective prevention, detection and resolution of threats. Meanwhile, key strategic benefits will be an unlocked through an enhanced ability to forecast and report on cyber risk exposure.
Once these benefits are in place, it will be possible to calculate the likelihood of a breach both pre and post the introduction of threat intelligence. Luxury businesses will then be able to calculate the ROI offered by threat intelligence over a given period.
Getting to this point relies on cutting-edge expertise combined with the very latest solutions. Clearly the volume of information online means businesses can struggle to sift through potential findings and identify truly malicious activity, such as spoof websites and fraudulent use of their brand identity.
With the right solutions in place, however, businesses can not only gain insight into the true nature of emerging threats, but also gain clarity into the real ROI these can deliver – whether that’s through guarding against breaches or enhancing the digital experience.
