Luxury marketing doesn’t need to create its own ‘laws of growth’ for brands to succeed; there are some law-like patterns that luxury categories share with others and understanding them will make luxury brand marketing stronger.
I am not a fan of extreme sports. I once tandem skydived and all I got out of it was a video of me looking like an upset pufferfish (I breathed in at the wrong time).
But I am a fan of extreme research, where we take what we know and test it in unusual and unexpected waters. I am also a fan of fashion and shopping, which made it irresistible to test some fundamental patterns in buyer behaviour and brand perceptions in a Luxury brand context, because of the long standing belief that “luxury is different”.
What comes to mind when you think of luxury? Brands like Chanel, Louis Vuitton, Gucci and Balenciaga, with their iconic designs, gorgeous retail outlets, and often eye-watering prices. Think about the last luxury product you bought… it’s a world apart from your last toothpaste purchase. Or is it?
Examining how brands are bought and how buyers think about brands forms the foundations of effective marketing and because of their regularity – can be thought of as ‘empirical laws’.
But these empirical laws do not hold all the time, everywhere – even gravity is weaker on a mountain top.
With a limited customer base (not everyone can afford $5,000 for a handbag) it’s easy to assume loyalty is essential to growth, and that offering something different/unique/exclusive is needed to achieve that loyalty.
A challenge for the sector, particularly for small brands, is the difficulty in getting luxury brand data. Indeed many academic papers on the topic are conducted with university or M-turk samples due to the cost of getting real luxury buyers for research.
We are fortunate to have invested in some data on luxury buying and perceptions of luxury brands, collected from luxury buyers. Does luxury marketing need to create its own ‘laws of growth’ for brands to succeed? Let’s look at some empirical laws and see how luxury categories perform.
Read the full article in Marketing Week.