The Luxury Strategy: Break the Rules of Marketing to Build Luxury Brands

One should therefore never say ‘This is luxury and that isn’t’ without pref-acing the remark with ‘For me’, ‘To my way of thinking’, or ‘In my opinion’, just as one should never say ‘This is beautiful’ or ‘This is ugly’ without pref-acing it with ‘I find that’ – there again, luxury and art are closely related, and success in both can never be absolute.

a social aspect (luxury as a social statement in relation to other products or services – connecting luxury, brand status);

• a personal aspect (luxury as an individual pleasure – cocooning luxury, customer experience).

Luxury has to be multisensory: it is not only the appearance of a Porsche that matters but also the sound of it, not only the scent of a perfume but also the beauty of the bottle it comes in. It is multisensory compression.

When it comes to luxury, hedonism takes precedence over functionality.

Once, a swimming-pool was a luxury, but it is no longer so. A private elevator still is one, for it harks back to the multistorey private hotel.

The DNA of luxury, therefore, is the symbolic desire to belong to a superior class, which everyone will have chosen according to their dreams, because anything that can be a social signifier can become a luxury. By the same token, anything that ceases to be a social signifier loses its luxury status.

once people have tasted luxury in whatever area, it is very difficult for them to turn away from it – to come back to earth. When there is a fall in spending power, we witness a symmetrical phenomenon to the one that we identified when spending power was increased: people start cutting their expenditure on every kind of conventional product (for example, they will trade their Chevrolet for a smaller and more economic Ford), but it’s a different matter when it comes to luxury products (they will keep their Ferrari, even if it means leaving it in the garage and going by bicycle, on the pretext that it’s more ecological). They will do without almost anything, so long as they can afford the upkeep on their mansion. And there is a point that is worth noting here, one that we shall be returning to time and again: this ‘ratchet effect’ of luxury affects both the personal aspect of luxury (‘I really can’t do without the comfort of my cashmere sweater’) and its public one (‘I drive a Ferrari’).

The annual Steve Jobs show at Apple is just like some ancient religious ceremony conducted by a High Priest – just as the purpose behind the sacrificial ceremonies of the Aztecs was to keep the sun in orbit for another cycle, so the Apple Show is designed to reassure its worshippers that revolutionary new products are going to be able to sustain them for one more year.

If this globalization does bring a luxury brand financial success and durability, the major risk then is that it forgets its roots – like some people who, their own success having gone to their heads, forget or even reject their parents; once separated from its roots, the brand ceases to be a luxury brand and is immediately relegated to the category of just another competitor in consumer goods brands – a battleground for which it is particularly unsuited.

a luxury brand that cannot go global finishes up disappearing; it is better to have a small nucleus of clients in every country – because there is every chance that it will grow – than a large nucleus in just one country, which could disappear overnight. That’s the law of globalization.