Luxury Branding

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.

Growth is a blessing for all brands, if they are profitable. For luxury brands, however, it is a mixed one.

Luxury is a business model. This has been empirically fine tuned through time by those luxury brands that dominate the pantheon worldwide: Louis Vuitton, Chanel, Gucci, Hermès, Ferrari, Rolex and so on.

The imminent arrival of the Apple Watch and a phalanx of other smartwatches into the global market was the main topic for debate last week at Baselworld – the annual gathering of the watchmaking industry in Switzerland. There were three very different competitive responses from the Swiss brands in attendance at the event.