Meet the Luxury Blockchain
- By CDOTrends editors
- May 23, 2022
Luxury brands are under pressure to keep up with their customers' changing needs and expectations, who are increasingly digital-savvy and demanding more personalized experiences. Blockchain, for example, is being used by some luxury brands to create more transparency around the provenance of their products and build trust with customers.
A new consortium will explore how they can use blockchain to improve the way luxury goods are bought and sold. The Aura Blockchain Consortium, which includes major luxury brands such as Louis Vuitton, Prada, and Richemont, will look at integrating the technology into the luxury industry, focusing on areas such as supply chain management, authentication, and provenance.
Mercedes-Benz has also joined as the first car maker in the consortium, with its collaborative concept of "by luxury brands for luxury brands." This provides Mercedes-Benz and the other brands with ready-to-use, cutting-edge blockchain and NFT technology that will help take the customer experience to the next level.
So what does this mean for customers of Mercedes-Benz?
For starters, they'll be able to enjoy enhanced security and transparency when it comes to their transactions. And because the consortium is built on blockchain, they'll also have access to a wealth of data and insights to improve the customer experience.
The Aura Blockchain Consortium also opens up new possibilities for Mercedes-Benz to explore when it comes to digital brand development. For example, the company can now create its original digital artworks as NFTs (non-fungible tokens).
Digital art will become an essential element of the company's future, and the Aura Blockchain Consortium is expected to give Mercedes-Benz a big head start in this new field.
The consortium takes a long-term view of the metaverse and has accelerated its activities in developing its technical roadmap to include various NFT solutions for luxury brands.
The first use case is a digital certificate of authenticity for artworks. The digital certificate of authenticity will use blockchain to store data such as the artist's name, the title of the work, and when it was created. This gives the artwork a unique value that would otherwise not be achievable in the digital world, where content is often widely copied.
“As a design team, we consistently strive to pair beauty with the extraordinary in all dimensions. Therefore we are pushing our digital luxury ambition with Crypto Art as a new expression of our style and creativity," says Gorden Wagener, chief design officer of Mercedes-Benz Group AG. “We use digital art to create desire in-car and beyond. Incorporating it into the UI/UX is one future opportunity to differentiate the Mercedes-Benz luxury experience through the joy of the unexpected. It offers exciting potential for our design approach to exceeding customer expectations with extraordinary and surprising elements — we call it the X-Factor.”
“We are delighted to welcome Mercedes-Benz as our fifth founding member, coming from an entirely new sector of the luxury industry. This is a concrete step towards our overarching strategy to welcome all sectors of the luxury industry," says Daniela Ott, secretary-general of Aura Blockchain Consortium.