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This year’s Paris Olympics set out to be the most innovative and sustainable Olympic Games in history, following Tokyo 2020, which, although postponed to 2021, remained steeped in post-pandemic strife. The Paris 2024 Games have not only seen the return to full scale and public engagement, but this edition has also taken a leap in terms of technological advancements, with companies like Alibaba powering the transformation of the sporting event.
While the Chinese omnichannel giant has been a partner of the International Olympics Committee since 2017, leading cloud-based solutions and e-commerce services for the games, this year marks the arrival of its immersive public-facing experiences in Europe. The partnership supersedes Alibaba’s usual provision of back-end structural support — which has previously proved fundamental to broadcasting and adjudicating the games — with the group’s high-profile ‘Wonder Avenue’ pop-up occupying the Champs-Élysées throughout the summer months.
Located at the eastern end of Paris’s world-famous shopping district, the 88-metre-long Wonder Avenue installation takes visitors on a futuristic voyage that blurs the lines between physical and digital commerce, while also bringing China’s cutting-edge shopping technologies to the heartland of French luxury. Underpinned by Alibaba Cloud’s proprietary large language model (LLM) ‘Qwen’, Wonder Avenue welcomes guests to a hyper-personalised shopping experience that offers a taste of what the phygital future holds. It’s an experience promising to not only be an imaginative illustration of the future of shopping, but a manifestation of it.
A journey of four stages, each stop-off invites visitors to interact with different shopping experiences. In the first stage, guests create a personal avatar using a touch-screen booth, which is tailored by a French and English-speaking smart assistant. Once signed up, visitors are issued a personalised pass to unlock different experiences throughout the installation. Then, in the ‘Make Up’ stage, visitors receive tailored recommendations and are able to customise cosmetic and fragrance products, while a smart assistant examines the visitor’s image and applies products virtually to the avatar to perfect their look. Guests are also issued a personalised perfume card.
This hyper-tailored approach to consumption helps to meet an underserved need in the beauty space. The latest Vogue Business Beauty Index indicates that while nearly three-quarters of global beauty shoppers desire personalised or customised beauty products, only 47 per cent of assessed brands currently offer this. Similarly, while 70 per cent of consumers would like brands to offer artificial intelligence skin diagnostics for things like foundation colour matching, only 30 per cent of brands provide this solution. The possibility of leveraging AI technology to deliver highly tailored beauty solutions would plug a significant gap in the market that consumers are actively calling for.
While this tool is more of a novelty in Western markets, Chris Tung, president of Alibaba Group, strategic development, notes that Chinese consumers are already much more familiar with the idea: “Our shoppers have long had access to tailor-made user interfaces and personalised recommendations, enabled by consumer insights and algorithms. Take our shopping assistant ‘Wenwen’ on Taobao, our leading e-commerce platform, as an example. It’s an LLM-powered generative AI assistant, so Wenwen can generate detailed product recommendations along with further questions to guide customers’ purchasing decisions. Shoppers can also use Wenwen to summarise the pros and cons of similar products. It’s a fully interactive experience that creates a totally tailored result. We are creating a future where the availability of ultra-personalised products will become normalised.”
In Wonder Avenue’s ‘Dress Up’ stage, visitors are immersed in a virtual fitting room where their avatars can be dressed using voice command. Visitors select the perfect outfit for their avatar and then generate a personalised poster of it. By tapping their pass, the poster can then be downloaded to share with friends via social media, amplifying the interaction beyond the pop-up and creating a seamless opportunity to boost advocacy — an effective technique in a market where recommendations from family and friends rank highly among purchase and discovery drivers.
Beyond just products, the ‘Dress Up’ stage also seeks to ignite other senses. At the music station, for example, the smart assistant quizzes visitors on their favourite sports and other preferences before producing a unique melody for the user, which can then be enhanced via other personalised elements. Tung highlights that the creation and application of music can be both an art and a science. “Music and sport have the most important connection. A specific sequence of music can even improve physical performance,” he says. Music offers another layer of enjoyment for visitors that resonates with the Olympic core of celebrating culture.
Meanwhile, during the fourth and final stage, guests are invited to take part in a runway show, alongside their avatars, within a parallel digital world. The show is documented through photos and videos, and includes the opportunity for visitors to capture selfies with their avatars. It’s an appealing concept as the luxury world welcomes the advent of Gen Z consumers who increasingly value fashion shows as sources of inspiration. And, for those who are unable to visit Paris in person, users of the Taobao app can dress avatars with one click in four parallel digital worlds; it’s an attraction that makes the whispers of digital twins, currently reserved for supermodels, a rising reality for all.
Tung anticipates that the appeal of digital twins and parallel worlds will only increase: “We believe that future shopping experiences, including those on e-commerce platforms, can take place in both physical and virtual environments. As you can see through the Alibaba Wonder Avenue tour, the use of AI can provide an extension of the physical shopping environment and vice versa. What’s more, as a customer’s style evolves, the AI assistant can interpret these changes and adapt the avatar to their changing tastes. This means a shopper can encounter numerous potential versions of themselves throughout their life and throughout limitless virtual worlds.”
Hyper-personalisation and digital twins aside, Alibaba’s Wonder Avenue raises a question around the importance of continuing innovation within the luxury industry. It’s not the first time the e-commerce trailblazer has sought to embed its experiential offerings in the luxury shopper’s psyche. Earlier this year, LVMH and Alibaba cemented a deal that will help the luxury conglomerate elevate its omnichannel, data and digital capabilities, including the integration of its LLM Qwen into chat interfaces and wider clienteling services in China.
This could prove a smart move that future-proofs the LVMH portfolio. Despite boasting several heritage brands that benefit from a reputation for timelessness and elite status, consumer data from the latest Vogue Business Index indicates a weakening link between strong heritage positioning and purchase intent. Instead, purchase intent is beginning to lean towards brands with a reputation for innovation, uniqueness and self-expression, which makes a compelling case for investing in AI and digital transformation. Brands that can successfully harness innovation as a differentiator could have a stronger chance of safeguarding their commercial appeal in years to come.
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