D&G

THE CONTROVERSIAL VIDEOS The three 40-second videos were released on D&G's
Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook profiles, as well as its Weibo account, to promote "The Great
Show," which was intended to serve as a "tribute to China". In the first episode, the model is
trying to eat an entire pizza, prodding it with her chopsticks as a narrator asks whether it is too
huge for her and offers advice to use the chopsticks as pliers. The second and third episodes saw
the model attempting to eat a cannoli and spaghetti, respectively. 8 Gabbana's response, on
Instagram, to model Michele Tranovo's criticism of the brand's advertising only added fuel to the
fire. Screen captures of the exchange depicted a series of messages in which Gabbana appeared
to complain about the backlash sparked by the videos and also to direct derogatory remarks
toward Chinese people and China in general. 9 The designer denied being the author of the
messages in question: he and the brand posted messages alleging that their Instagram accounts
had been hacked, with Gabbana writing "not me" over the screen captures. D&G used its official
Instagram account to post a message apologizing for the distress caused by the "unauthorized"
posts and to say the brand had "nothing but respect" for China and its people. An official
statement to the press followed, saying that the brand's dream had been to offer a tribute to
China's history and vision with love for China and the brand itself. The company founders,
Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana, were the driving source behind the brand's creative and
stylistic products and activities. They also oversaw development of the company's strategies,
both on a global scale and at the company's core. After working as assistant designers, the two
founded Dolce & Gabbana with an opening runway show in Milan in 1985 part of the new
talents category and at the invitation of Italian fashion promoter Beppe Modenese. In 1999, the
brand created a children's collection and presented it at a children's fashion show in Florence.
D&G owed much of its massive size and success to the designers' use of elements from Italian
culture. The two-level, 500-square-metre boutique, a tribute to the designers' passion for the
performing arts, was designed by architect Gwenael Nicolas of Curiosity and took cues from an
18th-century opera house in Milan. The boutique had a museum- like feel to it and displayed
women's and men's accessories and ready-to-wear collections. In 2018, Gabbana said that he did
not want a Japanese designer to work for the brand. Dolce, speaking to the magazine Panorama,
called children born of the technique unconvincing "children of chemistry" and referred to
surrogates as "wombs for hire,...choice[s] from a catalogue". CONTROVERSIAL
MARKETING STRATEGIES The controversial video in which the Chinese model used
chopsticks to consume Italian food was not the first time a major brand had needed to apologize
for offending a large market of Chinese consumers and it would likely not be the last. In its 2017
marketing campaign in Beijing, the company's portrayal of poor working class citizens as
"normal" was seen as distasteful and misrepresentative of China's economic progress. 35 D&G,
along with several other major luxury brands, had adjusted its expansion plans and marketing
strategies to accommodate an increase in the importance of the Asian luxury goods market."The
Great Show," cancelled on November 21, 2018, was intended to serve as an indicator that D&G
was catering to China. Chen acknowledged China's wealth, but asserted that the country was also
rich in its values, culture, and people. 4 billion was a "huge consumption power" and that the
hundreds of millions voicing their outrage could not be ignored. Based on this logic, the potential
loss for D&G could only worsen, as the Chinese luxury goods market was huge and rapidly
continued to grow. Some luxury brands had even played up their appreciation of the Chinese
culture, in stark contrast to D&G's marketing approach. A professor at New York University's
Stern School of Business agreed that the controversy was a crisis and that D&G would have
difficulty recovering.

Conclusion

The most evident markers of a response included the video apology and subsequent messages
on social media platforms about the supposed hacks that had resulted in the inflammatory
messages and the videos themselves. However, given the reality that the Chinese luxury
market was so large and continued to grow, it was likely that the aforementioned expert opinion
about the brand's profits suffering from this mistake would become reality. What mitigation
strategy or actions could D&G undertake to repair the damage done to its reputation?
 Ensighten
When the company first announced its product in September it had five customers, and in the
past three months, Manion and his team of seven had worked hard to bring more clients on
board. Manion explained the situation: As a new venture, with little money, trying to establish
not just our company but the space itself, it is tempting to do anything to get a deal done. Quinn,
a partner and intellectual property specialist with the law firm Larkin Hoffman in Minneapolis,
offered his view: At the end of the day, you have to figure out what you need to have and fight
for it. I kept seeing the same problem at many of our clients and in the summer of 2009, had the
insight that there might be a solution to this problem. The earliest solutions were built around
"weblogs," a detailed map of all the activity in the browser...but tracking and analyzing that data
was terribly cumbersome. So, for instance, if you want to track where a customer comes from,
you put a tag on the landing page, and when that page opens, the tag sends a piece of data to
the analytical application that is tracking the origin of the customer. The same principle applies
to the links people click on, the amount of time they spend on a page, and where they go when
they leave. Imagine a company implementing a new advertising campaign and wanting to tag
every page to track the effectiveness of the campaign. Ensighten's Solution Manion and a small
team of coders developed a simple solution to this problem, refined it on several Stratigent
customers, and convinced themselves they had a real breakthrough: "Once you had our system
up and running, you could do a piece of work like this in literally minutes without sacrificing the
richness and complexity of data or analytical output. Manion decided to invest virtually all of his
time and attention on the new venture, and handed over the day-to-day operation of Stratigent
to that company's management team in early 2010. Then, in September of that year, Manion
and a small team moved to Silicon Valley. We bootstrapped our way into building the product,
and I did not want to announce what we were doing and attract a lot of attention.... But it is a
problem shared across many different parts of the business, from IT to marketing to media to
operations, and there is no identified budget for it. It does not pay to raise a lot of VC and hire
more salespeople until the market "tips" or "crosses the chasm". It can result in 1 million
different permutations of the tags that appear on a page, but it is relatively simple for us to
implement.

These early agreements helped us to learn what customers were going to push back on and
what terms were truly important for us to insist on having; but these early negotiations with
clients focused mainly on the business terms and for the most part did not include legal counsel
on either side. I was also wary of terms that could put us in the position of having to give a client
money back, since we intended to leverage this capital to accelerate our growth. It was a mess,
because it was the kind of contract they would usually use with a consultant, but we were
providing a piece of licensed software. Manion himself "went to school" on the experience: "I
worked closely with Jim and really tried to use it as an education for me so I could do most of
this on my own. It made sense for Microsoft to license Word or Oracle to license its database
software because the license does not confer ownership, and therefore, it allows the licensor to
impose a much more restrictive set of terms on the client. Software licensors restrict the ability
of the licensee with respect to the purpose to which the product is put, for example, the ability to
copy or sell services based on the software to others. Now, with the guts of the software sitting
in the cloud, it is a bit different. They get a right to access the software that is sitting in the cloud.
Essentially, by paying a fee, the customer gets the right to use the functionality of an application
without ever putting the actual software on their computer. Of course, the customer still gets a
little piece of software that sits on their hardware and serves as a connector, so technically, it
may make sense to license that, but the bulk of the functionality takes place in the cloud. He
called Quinn and involved him in the negotiations: "It is a big deal for us, and while I am
comfortable having pushed this 80% of the way, I do not want to make a mistake at this point".
For a company of their size, a $200,000 deal is not big enough to pull the general counsel and
his staff away from core legal issues. The problem is, we do not yet know which issues are
which...so, we need to push a little on all sides to see where the box really is. Every page of
traffic passes through our cloud-based servers, and we apply the appropriate set of tags to each
page as it moves through, but that is all we do. On the other hand, there are some things we
just cannot live with in this deal, let alone allow them to become part of agreements with other
clients.