Luxury Branding

Luxury marketing is largely about exclusivity. If everyone has it, it’s not luxury. The popular bumper-sticker slogan, “He who dies with the most toys, wins,” summarizes the desire to accumulate these badges of achievement.

The new millennium brought a major shift to the world of brand building. Brands are no longer just marketing instruments for attracting customers; they are embraced as guiding the enterprise overall, inspiring and engaging internal and external stakeholders.

In 2017, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) announced that Coty, the U.S. beauty group, did not break any laws of competition when it forbade a German distributor from selling Coty products on Amazon.de, the German Amazon site. In Europe, luxury products are able to limit sales of their products to only those “stores that maintain their luxury image,” Financial Times reported. The ECJ calls this “selective distribution.”

The American Express Centurion Card and its sibling The Platinum Card are prestigious, as are The Chase Sapphire Reserve and The J.P. Morgan Reserve Credit Card. These cards can buy luxuries. A Regal Cruise is luxurious with a wide range of luxury amenities. A Venicci Shadow 2-in-1 Stroller is a very prestigious perch for your infant. An Oscar is a prestigious award. But, what is prestige? What is luxury? These two concepts – prestige and luxury – are not the same. Yet, they tend to be used as synonyms. This is a marketing mistake.

Five years ago we embarked on an extensive research into what drives the success of certain class of premium-priced brands that seem to flourish, rather than fade as time goes by and we get to know them more.