The Ultimate Guide to Luxury Brand Marketing

What is luxury?

Luxury is a complex endeavor based on a simple principle. Let‘s uncover the evolutionary principle underpinning it and break it down to it‘s most simple form and make it easy to understand.

Here it is in a nutshell:

1. Make something very attractive every one loves.
2. Refuse to sell and make it hard to acquire and own.

That’s it. This ist the very basic principle of luxury. However, this simple principle delivers amazing results.

1. It creates instant desirability
2. It makes people dream
3. People want things they can‘t have
4. It creates envy
5. It splits people into two groups: lovers and haters.
6. And that‘s just the beginning.

In this article, we look in depth at this concept and discover what it has to offer for your brand.

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What Is Luxury Brand Marketing?

Luxury brand marketing is the art, craft and science of building luxury brands. Luxury capitalizes on the desire all humans have for beautiful objects and on the deep rooted need for recognition, the desire for higher status and the emotional need to elevate oneself. For this reasons, luxury uses dream marketing, which is different from more conventional marketing strategies and tactics, to sell to an aspirational or affluent audience.

Contrary to conventional Marketing method, luxury attracts buyers, not chasing them. Luxury is desired by successful individuals because it helps them to separate themself from the masses. Luxury is all about stratification, not about equality.

To be luxury and to sell luxury to affluent buyers, you need to incorporate the following essential luxury brand components in your branding strategy. For luxury it is important to focus on quality, style, craftsmanship, customer service, heritage and more. Let’s look at each components one by one.

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Core Elements Of A Luxury Brand:

Exclusivity

Exclusivity is a core component of any luxury brand. Exclusivity is of utmost importance because it ensures the rank and status of the luxury brand as a cultural leader. Exclusivity is a result of rarity and heritage a brand has built over time. This ensures the desirability of the brand. Scarcity drives desirability because valuable products or objects are naturally in short supply and everyone desires something that's special and not easily accessible.

Craftsmanship

Craftsmanship is another important aspect of Luxury. Luxury objects are rare because they are built by hand using the most exclusive materials. Luxury takes pride in the quality and execution of their beautiful products. Luxury brands hire the most talented crafts men and women to create the most exquisite and beautifully crafted objects on this planet.

Style & Timeless Design

Luxury is about style and timeless design. Luxury isn’t a trend but a timeless classic. Classic objects retain their value over time and still look beautiful after a long time has passed. Classic objects give you a higher value because luxury is less affected by changing trends in comparison to fashion.

Heritage

Heritage is very important for a luxury brand. Heritage is a sign of authenticity and credibility. Heritage is often built by a long term commitment to a craft and creating classic and endurable designs that have the potential to become icons. If your brand has heritage, it is a big source of brand equity for your brand. If you don‘t have it it‘s hard to build but possible if you are willing to pay the price by investing in your brand.

Superior Quality

Superior quality is a must for any luxury brand. Quality is a given because luxury clients are known to have high standards and they only spend a lot on your products if you are up to that standard. Luxury clients value the well-build character of the products and only accept the best they can have in life.

Client Services

Customer service is a key component of a luxury brand experience. The nature of selling high price luxury goods requires trust between brand and their clients. For this reason sales people need to build good relationships with their clientele. Having trust, make decision making much faster and friction less.

After sales services are a specialty of luxury brands. Because luxury brands have a long time perspective, they are well aware that you need to take care of your clients even when a long time has passed from the moment the purchase has taken place.Luxury brands know, after the sale is before the sale. This makes it necessary to nurture your client relationships without any garantee your investment will be repaid.

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Types Of Luxury Brand Communication:

Luxury brand communication can be categorized in two categories that each use a different way to attract their audience.

First there are heritage brands that have a long tradition and heritage that’s rooted in a long history of classic and timeline design objects. Modern luxury brands can usually not offer heritage, for these brands they need to use storytelling. They use stories that resonate with their desired audience to attract them.

Heritage:‍
Heritage is reserved for traditional and old luxury brands with lot’s of history because of their time and experience and heritage they have created over time. Heritage is built over generations of great quality work and craftsmanship and a true dedication to their craft. Without an unwavering commitment to quality and style, building great heritage is hard if not impossible to achieve.

Story Brands:
These are the contemporary and upcoming luxury brands. The future of luxury if you want to call it like that. Their growth is accelerated by social media platforms which are perfect for storytelling. Storytelling is a necessity for these brands because in the absence of heritage and history, story is the only tool they can use to attract and gain the attention of their desired audience.

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Different Types Of Luxury:

There are different client types that attracted to luxury by different factors and drive them to different brands. Each type has characteristics that separate these buyer types from each other and differ in their motivation to why they purchase certain brands.

Luxury and Flashy Logos:
First, there is the flashy luxury brand buyer, he/she is aspirational and driven by the desire for status. He wants to communicate and appear richer than he really is. He is proud to wear clothes with big, visible luxury brand logos. They also often wear clothing with the visual signature style all over his/her body.

Quiet Luxury:
Quiet Luxury is the complete opposite of the flashy luxury buyer. These people are the original wealthy class and known for their refined style and taste. Quiet Luxury as as the name suggest is quiet, meaning it’s only noticeable by people in the known. Quiet Luxury is the ultimate sophistication and classic luxury style.

Ultra Luxury:
Ultra Luxury is another category of luxury. Ultra Luxury is the highest level of Luxury there is. Mostly referring to real estate or car brands like Rolls Royce. Also brands like high jewelry brand Graff are considered Ultra Luxury.

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Luxury Categories:

Here is a list of industries and categories that are considered Luxury:

• Fashion and Clothing: The most common und popular category of luxury.
• Accessories: Accessories are the stamens pieces of everyday luxury.
• Jewelry
• Watches
• Financial Services
• Cars
• Boats and Yachts
• Real Estate
• Haute Cousine
• Art
• Auction Houses
• Writing Tools like Pens and Notebooks
• Private Jets - the pinnacle of luxury.
• Luggage - The statement piece for the Jetsetter und frequent traveller.
• Skincare
• Drinks and Cocktails
• Wine & Champagne
• Glassware and Ceramics
• Vases and other Design objects
• Sports

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Strategies For Luxury Brand Marketing:

Make your Product very attractive

‍One of the most important things for a luxury brand, is to be attractive and have an attractive product. Attractive products attract and makes people fall in love with your brand. This attractiveness is the source that makes people dream about your brand by inspiring people across the globe to lead a perfect life.

Scarcity and Limited Product Sales

Luxury brands operate on a supply-based economic model and strategy, meaning their products don’t exist in high quantity. Unlike mass-market products that are manufactured in the factory, luxury products are made by hand and manual labour. Because of this, Luxury takes longer to create and uses more exclusive materials and resources which naturally leads to higher scarcity and exclusivity. To prevent the overuse of products, luxury brands need to limit sales of even their more popular products. This ensures the value and exclusivity of the luxury brand is maintained. If luxury brand products become too common, their high end luxury image will begin to suffer. This happens when ordinary people, also called the masses, start buying from the brand and is why luxury products should never be to accessible. The brand will start to lower in value as soon as their promise, to deliver quality and excellence is broken and the market starts to respond to the change in strategy. This is why consistency is so important for brands of all sizes. Because of this factor, many brands raise the average prices of their goods over the long term, ensuring a brand enjoys their luxury status for a long period of time.

Create artificial scarcity

In addition to organic scarcity, you can also consider artificial scarcity. This is one of the oldest trick in the book for luxury marketers. This involves intentionally producing less than the demand requires. A waitlist strategy can be used to make customers wait until the product is available again. This keeps clients excited and eager for their desired product to become available once more. The distinction between luxury products and regular products is large. They exist on oposite spectrums in the market. It's all about how the market responds to your brand image. Regular products suffer from lower sales, if prices are increasing. That's because most people in society consider the price more important than the problem solving nature and benefits a product provides.

All this changes however if you enter the luxury market. In Luxury, higher prices can mean higher demand, because the higher exclusivity means increased value and higher desirability. This increases demand and desirablity amog luxury customers. Desiarability is created when a brand becomes highly respected and renowned in society but simultaneously is hard to aquire.

Make Your Products hard to Purchase

Luxury brands don’t plan to sell as much as possible. They focus only on the right buyers for their brand. Luxury brands refuse to be too available and sometimes refuse to sell to people. Luxury products are literally trophy objects people are proud to own. To access the most luxurious product, you often have to invest a lot into the entry-level or mid-Level product line of a brand to be considered and granted access to their most exclusive and prestigious product offerings.

Don't test.

Luxury Brands don’t usually test their products. Luxury brands know, testing would make their products more ordinary and standardized, loosing the unique style that their buyers are attracted to. Luxury brands are well aware what their clients desire and how to build objects they love. However, despite the best efforts a brand can make, this strategy can lead to failures sometimes exactly because they are not willing to test. But this is an expected result under these conditions.

Be selective about Clients‍

‍A selective customer base is another way luxury brands capitalize on this evolutionary tendency for rarity and exclusivity. Being selctive about your clients and audience, makes your brand even more attractive and desired by everyone. Luxury brands best clients are either high-net-worth-individuals or individuals who have proven their worth and value in society. And these people are chased by the masses.

Build Authority

Luxury brands need to have authority. They have authority when it comes to style, class, taste and culture. A luxury brand must always enjoy a higher status than the clients buying it. Only then, a luxury brand can retain its aura and increase the status of their brand image. Authority is created by sticking to a craft for the long term and by becoming very knowledgable about it. This startegy has two main benfits.:

1. It makes you an expert crafts person
2. it's the best strategy to overcome competition.

Because most people are lazy and not willing to commit to one thing for life, this strategy alone already makes you a 1% person by simply not giving up.

Create and promote a refined taste.

Luxury brands differ not only in their products but also in style and the taste they produce and promote. Luxury is the taste of the elite and the wealthy class. It's refined, classy, sophisticated and elegant. To position yourself and differentiate in the luxury market, find a way to develop and design a unique style and design that makes you stand out and which can become your signature.

Targeting Non-Customers

Targeting non-customers is a great way to build brand awareness, get people in your city talking and encouraging your target audience to buy more from you. It increases your reputation and recognizabilit greatly and make sure everyone in your circle knows you have made it in the world.

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The challenge of staying exclusive while growing a luxury brand.

A fundamental challenge for luxury brands of all levels is the question how can a luxury brand grow while maintaining it's exclusive image and prestige. As we have already discussed, limited supply drives scarcity and demand. To balance growth and exclusivity, it's necessary to position diffrent products for diffrent stages at your customer journey. This way, you can welcome new audiences while still remaining very exclusive to your most discerning clientele. Ideally, you have at least 3 kinds of different product lines for different customers.

The entry level product line is accessible and aimed at new potential customers that just started to grow an interest in your brand. An ideal product for an entry line would be perfumes for example and many luxury brands offer this as an entry product. However, even while perfumes and other entry-line products are more accessible and affordable, it's important to make sure they remain some-what exclusive, by not offering them at the lowest possible price.

The mid-level product line is for the regular luxury client that has grown out of the accessible line and already made significant purchases from the brand. Most clients and customers stay at this level for the most of their life because of a lack of financial resources or a loosing interesst in the brand. But your best and most loyal client's will break out and become super fans and grow a real appetite for what you have to offer.

Ultra Luxury line: This is your most advanced line. The goal of the ultra luxury line is to position your brand as a top leader in luxury and attracts your most affluent clientele. Client's who purchase this line, are the biggest profit drivers and also have the highest life-time value of all your clients. This line is what makes your brand so iconic and desirable and is the reason why so many people start purchasing from your brand. Clients of the entry-levels are secretly hoping to raise up the economic pyramid one day so they can afford your most exclusive products.

Remember: The goal of any product pyramid is to take a unknown potential client that isn't yet a customer and turn him/her into a loyal customer as quickly as possible.

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Marketing Tactics That Are Not Luxury.

When it comes to luxury marketing, it's not only helpful to know what to do, it's also critical to understand what NOT to do. If you want to become luxury, you have to stay clear from the following marketing tactics. That’s because they all contribute to a lower perception of value, which naturally demotivates people to spend more on the products you offer.

1. Offering Discounts
   Luxury Brands don't discount their products. Luxury brands are aware of the worth and value to potential buyers. Discounting products would mean lower value and reputation and a less exclusive brand image, contributing to the decline in brand equity. This can of course mean lower sales but it's important to stick to it to retain your luxury brand image.
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2. Limited Time Offers
   You'll never see a real luxury brand doing limited time offers. These tactics are definitely not luxury. The goal of these offers is to sell more, which naturally leads to higher accessibility of these products. However, this is not the main goal of luxury brands. Their goal is to provide prestigious and exclusive objects for a selective audience.
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3. Holiday Sales
   Luxury brands don't engage in holiday sales or other sales events like Black Friday. These are effectivley Mass-market events, driving the masses to go shopping. Luxury brands are not in the mass market, the are in a league of its own. Luxury attracts and doesn't chase.
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4. Price anchoring
   Luxury brands don't engage in price anchoring techniques to make their products seem less expensive. On the contrary, luxury brands routinely raise the prices of their product lines to increase exclusivity. Price anchoring has the opposite effect, making products more accessible.

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Luxury Sales Channels and Client Touch points.

Some of the main sales channels which are available to luxury are noted below. There are other sales channels like phone sales but this isn't a common customer acquisition strategy in luxury.

Department and Multi-Brand Stores
Department stores, also known under the term multi-brand store is one of the most common ways to purchases so-called luxury products. However, this makes it easier to compare products and prices which is not really what you want for a luxury brand. Multi brand stores are based on the concept of diversification of product offering and they offer a lot of brands and products in the hopes they will sell more. This strategy is not really suitable to establish yourself as a luxury brand.

‍Brand Stores
Luxury Brand Stores created and operated by the luxury brand itself, is the gold standard in luxury distribution. This is the only sales channel a luxury brand is in complete control of every aspect of the brand experience. The benefits are obvious. You not only have zero competition in your own stores, this is also the only strategy to completely ensure the exclusive nature of your brand, it allows you to create that perfect shopping experience your clients crave.

‍eCommerce
Ecommerce is the most popular sales channel in the world by now. While ecommerce has definitely it's benefits, there are also downsides when it comes to luxury. One of the challenges ecommerce creates is that the beauty of luxury products can't be properly transmitted through digital channels. Further, comparability between brands increases in the digital space because the competition is just a click away. This can also lead to standardisation of product offerings and lead to price shopping from the buyers.

‍Social Media
Social Media is similar to e-commerce in regards to it's pros and cons, but offers the opportunity to sell directly where your target audience spends their leisure time online. However, social media is a rented space because a brand can never fully own or control a social media channel and depends soley on the host of these platforms.

‍Door to Door Sales
Door to Door sales used to be the original and traditional way to sell luxury. Luxury in it's purest form is a personal service and their products used to be made to order. However, through the development of modern ways of commerce, this is no longer a common or usual way for a luxury brand to do business.

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Dream Marketing:

Establishing credibility as a luxury brand is very important if you want to be successful in the luxury market and attract a demanding and sophisticated luxury audience. As mentioned before, luxury brands engage in dream marketing to sell their products. Luxury brands don't usually compete with other luxury brands directly but differentiate based on the dream they create and promote for their clientele.

Let me give you some examples:

Let's say you are a jewelry brand selling high jewelry. Your dream could be something like:

"Experience the life of a princess" or "Princess treatment for life.”

For a super car brand, the dream could be:

"Driving on the fast track to success”

After you have defined your dream, it's time to create a dream statement based on that dream. This is basically a brand positioning statment but tailored for the luxury industy. An example could be:

"We help the every day woman to feel and be like a princess so she can lead the life she wants and experience the best the world has to offer."

After you have established that, you define your brand values. Values are very important in branding and marketing, because all human behavior is based on it and depending on the values you endorse, you attract a different audience. Now, after you have defined your brand values and decided who you want to attract, you define your brand identity in the next step. After that, you develop a creative direction which visualizes your brand dream and dream positioning statement using photographs and other images. You then develop a typographic style and a color palette that fits your dream. And from these elements you develop your entire brand identity.

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Building Trust & Credibility for your Luxury Brand:

The barrier to entry the luxury market is high. There is already fierce competition and you need to offer something fresh, new or unique to make clients switch from their favorite brands. Establishing Trust and credibility with your target audience is absolutley crucial for your success as a luxury brand. Trust is the foundation of every business transaction and relationship, making the task of doing business so much easier. This is true whenever you are a client or an entrepreneur. Without trust, you have no business.

The truth is, luxury clients today demand more from the brands they purchase from. Luxury brands must tell a compelling narrative that is in line with the values they promote. Luxury must also deliver on the quality aspect and authenticity of the products they offer.

Stay true to your brand promise‍

‍Building Trust and credibility is all about doing what you said you would do. Also known as Brand Promise. What's the promise you make to your clients? Make it known and deliver on it.

Excellence

‍Ensure you deliver excellence from the start. You need to have a product that delights potential customers and gets them talking about your brand. Delivering an exceptional product and service to the market never goes out of style and is the basis to delight and excite clients, earn trust in the market and become a legendary brand.

Respond to problems quickly and promptly

‍A important messure for success is whenever and how fast your can respond to market turns.
In the early phases of your luxury startup, be forgiving and answer the concerns and problems of your clients quickly and promptly. The faster you can resolve the problems of your clients, the more they trust you and allow you to earn the reputation you deserve.

Ask for feedback on every purchase

‍Ask your early adopters for feedback on your products, ask them about their experience when buying from you and how they felt using your products. This is a great way to increase brand trustworthiness and establish yourself as a leader. It also gives you the critical information and know how you need to level up your entire business. Maintaining Trust and credibility is crucial for any luxury brand, to accomplish this, luxury brands need to constantly innovate and taking creative risks by offering new and interesting solutions to existing problems.‍

Long-term perspective

‍A long term perspective is recommended for running any business venture. Rule number 1. Stick to your strategy. It's very tempting nowadays to always chase the hot new thing or trend. However, if you want to be a luxury brand you need to stick to your roots and be proud of it. This doesn't mean a strategy is boring or too restrictive. Your strategy can and should evolve but you have to stay true to your brand essence and core values. Like luxury, the best startegies are usually timeless and only rarely have to change.

• Will excellence ever be not important? Probaly no.
• Will great customer service ever be out of fashion? Definitely not.
• Will great quality be ever replaced by cheap competitors? Probably no also.

So as you can see, the best strategies are timeless and always keep generating results. They might be boring to some, but success is keep doing "obvious" and "boring" things for life. Success is doing common sense things every day but we all know, common sense is not common practice.

Hire great employees

‍Aim to hire employees for the long term. The longer someone works for your brand the more a brand relys on them. They develop and retain critical information about your business and become indispensable.The longer your employees stay in your company, the more they contribute to consistency. Developing good relationships is key for a luxury brand - whenever it's with employees or clients.

Have good values

‍What have successful nations, the entire economy and all human relationships in common? It's values. Nothing in the world beats a person or business that has good values. Superior people are always the ones with the best values. So develop good values for your brand and communicate them - and then stick to them, no matter what. Being true and believable about your values attracts the right people to your brand - your dream clients. What has this to do with trust? Everything! If people like your values and know you stay true to them, trust is the natural result of this.

Creative Experimentation‍

‍How to gain instant credibility for your brand? Do creative experimentations! What I mean is this: Show your creative expertise to the public. Make it obvious why the creative direction and design of your brand is the right way. Develop a reputation for creative design by regularly promoting design excellence in the public. For example, instead of creating prototypes only for in-house use, start selling them in small quatnities to an exclusive circle of your customers. This helps you get attention, interest, delivering proof of your know-how and expertise as well getting important feedback.

Premium Pricing:

Luxury brands adopt a premium pricing strategy because the process of crafting such exquisite products demands substantial investment in terms of capital, time, creativity, skill, and unwavering dedication. To gain access to these exclusive items, clients are required to pay what can be considered an entry fee to become part of this prestigious club. This is effectively realized through a carefully structured premium pricing approach.

Limited Editions and Brand Partnerships:

Luxury brands love to collaborate with artists and other brilliant creative people. By actively collaborating with artists that have value but aren't well-known to a wider audience yet, luxury brands can effectively position themself as a leader in their industry and among influential people. These limited edition created in collaboration with artists create even more scarcity for the brand and drive popularity and sales.

Bespoke Services And Products:

Luxury brands offer bespoke services to their clientele. To gain access to the pinnacle of luxury, a bespoke product or service is an excellent way to go. From made-to-measure, to exclusive colours, different style, personalization and more. There are many ways luxury items can be personalized to fit the complex and distinctive lifestyle of their demanding audience.

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Branding Essentials Of Luxury Brands:

Brand Vision and Mission

‍Every Luxury brand needs a vision and mission of what it wants to accomplish in the world. This drives their whole strategy and product development as well as marketing. A cohesive and defined vision and mission offers a guideline for the management to align their everyday operation to a greater goal.

Creating Icons

‍Icons are the north start of luxury brands. They are the legendary objects that drive desirability and get the attention of new audiences. Products become Icons when They create publicity and an uproar in society. This can be accomplished through innovation. A new material or style for example.

Brand Communication

‍All external brand communication is about awareness, engagement and publicity. Luxury is also Infamous for advertising to non-clients. This is important because luxury flourishes by being respected by everyone, even people who can’t afford it. But there is another reason: Luxury brands must transfer the respect the brand enjoys to their clients. Luxury is about earning respect by their peers and society for their success and accomplishments. To achieve this, everyone in society should know and recognize the brand. Client or not.

Luxury Brands are Clubs

‍Luxury brands are clubs. Luxury clients and fans like to connect with other luxury buyers. This is why you have to create a community or club so your clients can meet and get to know each other. This is done through exclusive events wich are available to your most loyal clients.

Defining Style and Taste in Society

‍Luxury brands and their clients are the leaders and taste makers of society. They shape the direction and discussion of public opinion. To make this work, luxury brands must be competent and an authority when it comes to style, taste and culture.

Storytelling and Myth building

‍Luxury brands must engage in building myths and mystery around their brands. Luxury brands are focused on a creator figure which develops the creative direction of the brand. Create mystery about your brand by avoiding sharing to much. Keep some secrets and let people wonder.

Luxury Brand Management:

Brand Management is about aligning the every day operations of a brand with it’s core values and strategy. It's about ensuring consistency and cohesiveness across all aspects of the brand.

Core Tasks Of Brand Management Are:

Managing Expectations and Communication

Managing and communicating expectation is ia core component of any branding journey. This can be done by using your visual identity, brand communication, product presentations and more.

Ensure Consistency and cohesiveness across all touchpoints

‍These is achieved through design, strategy and excellent customer service.

Hire the best

‍Exceptional quality requires exceptional talent. Whenever it’s sales people, crafts people or on the management level. Exception quality is a must to remain relevant in todays competitive market and ever changing world. However, the best talent isn’t always found outside. It’s often also already working for the brand. Real Luxury entrepreneurs invest in their people and educate them. They don’t rely solely on the education system to teach the people the skills they need. Being proactive is always a winning strategy in the evolution of the brand.

Long-term perspective

‍Luxury brands remain true to their vision and have a long term prospective on how to create value for generations.

Luxury Brand Experience

One of the key challenges of building a luxury brand image is creating a luxury experience that satisfies the most discerning people. To achieve this, a cohesive luxury brand experience must be established across the whole customer journey. Here are some strategies you could use to accomplish this task:

Excellent Customer Service

‍Delighting customers is the main task of any customer service person. They have to avoid negative experiences as much as possible or at least resolve them quickly and in a positive way. Studies have shown that nothing repels customer more easily than negativity. For this reason, making sure you customer are happy and positive, ensures your long-term success.

Personal Relationships

‍Personal Relationships are important to sell any high end products. Because investing in high end pieces involves careful consideration and a deep level of trust between the brand and their clientele.

Great Design on All Customer Touchpoints.

‍Great design makes business so much easier. Design is visual language and storytelling. Design allows you to tell who you are without using a lot of words and say things which are sometimes impossible to explain with language. Design is more than about looking good. Design connects sender and receiver - Brand and Client - to communicate on the same frequency. This is why a well designed client experience is a must for a luxury brand. Business and selling is about solving problems by reducing friction as much as possible. Friction delays gratification, makes people suffer for longer until their problems are resolved. This is nothing most people or clients enjoy.

Add Elements of delight:

‍Surprise your clients with small little geusters your client's dont expect. Like little accessories that complement their purchase but aren't too costly for your brand to include.

Point of Sale

‍Your Point of Sale is an extension of your brand identity and digital platforms. It’s the home-base where clients experience your brand in real life. In many cases, it’s not always possible to visit the workshop of a luxury brand. The only place most customers come into contact with your brand is through your store and your sales staff. To ensure, your real life store aligns with your brand Identity is a must.

Exclusive Distribution

Exclusive Distribution is the gold standard for luxury brands. This means for the most part, selling through your own branded stores. While it’s possible to use multi brand stores, when every brand sells through the same sales channels, brand equity is destroyed. Thats because products are easier to compare and the environnement of the store is not created to tell the brand story in a compelling way. In multi-brand stores, The luxury brand isn’t in charge of the product presentation which can cause important problems and challenges. For this reasons, taking charge of your whole customer experience is super critical for success. Exclusive products need exclusive distribution.

Exclusive Clientele

‍Not only your products are exclusive, your client’s should be too. Nothing is more problematic for a brand as to have the wrong customers and clients. Because the clients of a brand are their ambassadors whenever they are public figures or not. In most cases, people speak with other human beings about their purchases and the brands they enjoy. And sometimes, the messenger really is the message, or at least a part of it. For this reason, choose your customers wisely, because the represent you.

Barriers to purchase.

‍Being and ensuring exclusivity and desirability is a very important aspect in luxury. For your exclusive products, think about creating barriers to purchase. This could be to ask your clients for substantial investments and purchases from your brand first, before offering bespoke, special or limited pieces to your clients.

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Definition Of Luxury Products:

Attention to Detail

‍Time and attention to detail are two sides of the same coin, because of attention to detail, luxury takes time and because of time, you need to pay attention to detail. If you are interested to have the best, you need to deliver that experience by paying attention to every little thing.

Best Materials

‍Luxury products are rare. Thats because they use the best and natural source material our planet has to offer. High quality materials are naturally in short supply. This is one of the many reasons why luxury objects take so much time to produce and deliver to the clients that desire them.

Classic Style over Trends

‍Luxury products represent a classic style that endures over a long time, even generations.

Made by Hand

‍Luxury values craft and craftspeople.

The Luxury Consumer:

Desire for Status

‍Desire for a higher status and being acknowledge for his/her accomplishments and success.

Refined Taste

Luxury clients have developed a refined and discerning taste, compatible with the luxury brands she/he enjoys and has a growing appetite for acquiring luxury goods.

Culturally Educated

Luxury customers are culturally educated. They know what’s good and what’s not. They understand the codes of luxury and how to speak it.

International Mindeset

Luxury customers love to travel and meeting new, interesting people. Whenever it’s for business or leisure. They enjoy learning about different cultures and have an open mind, enjoying new and great things with a sophisticated style and refined taste.

Changemaker in Society

Luxury customers are among the most refined people in society. They are the taste and changemakers, making stuff happen and evolving society. They are often experts, respected and well known in their industry.

High Standards

Luxury clients have high standards in everything they do. They demand quality form their favourite brands because they're accustomed to experience only the best.

Psychology Of Luxury Buyers:

Luxury customers differ from ordinary people by their willingness to to stand out. While the masses cares about security and is risk averse. Their desire to blend in and unwillingness to stand out, keeps them at the bottom of the economic pyramid. Luxury customers on the other hand don‘t blend in. They stand out. They are not afraid of their opinions and sometimes share it publicly. The psychology of luxury customers can be summarized by the following characteristics.

• Hedonistic: The typical luxury buyer is hedonistic and pleasure-seeking by nature. Luxury is about enjoying live to the fullest and using the best products and beautiful objects the world has to offer.‍
• Successful: Luxury buyers are driven and successful at what they do. They have the confidence to achieve anything they desire. They always get what they want.‍
• Perfectionistic: Luxury Buyers are perfectionistic. They appreciate well executed objects, attention to detail, quality and the story behind a product adds to the experience.

Luxury And Excess:

• Luxury represents a form of excess. To afford Luxury, you need an excess of capital and money. You need an excess of time to being able to develop such a refined taste and style. You need time, to enjoy these things and live life to the fullest. Excess is anything thats beyond the necessity for sustaining life.

Social Function of Luxury:

‍Elevating the Human Spirit:
Luxury is all about elevating the human spirit and reach higher levels of consciousness.

‍Preserving Valuable Know How in Society:
Luxury objects preserve a valuable know-how in society. It preserves the tradition and craftsmanship of a nation that is deeply rooted in the history of a country.

‍Shaping National Identity:
Luxury has the power to shape the national identity of a country. Instead of relying on hard powers like political power or the military, luxury represents a form of soft power that’s impossible to resist.

Elements of a successful Luxury Brand Strategy:

Flawless Execution

‍Your execution must be flawless. This is a given. You not only need to convince your customer to invest in your brand, you also need to compete with other luxury brands for attention and customers. To be able to have a chance in competing, your execution of your products, branding and marketing as well as your client experience must absolutely be flawless. Luxury customers are demanding and may not give you a second chance. This is especially hard if you are new on the market and still pretty unknown. So how do you achieve a flawless experience? Start by building a brand strategy and then design a brand identity that matches your strategy and attracts the audience you are after. If you have launched your brand, you need to be consistent with your new strategy and ensure that everything you put out in the market is cohesive and on brand. This is the job of the brand manager. Brand Management is all about ensuring your strategy is followed by the letter and ensuring consistency and cohesiveness. If you don‘t have a brand manager in your business right know, find someone in your company wo can do it for you, or do it yourself, as the owner of your business. However, the best strategy is to hire an expert brand manager or agency who has experience in branding and can fulfill his/her role in a successful and professional manner. This ensures wrong approaches and costly mistakes are avoided that hurt your brand down the line. Because all brands are public facing, everyone knows when you make a mistake. Depending on the mistakes, they are sometimes hard to fix or only after a substantial amount of time has passed. This slows down your growth unncessesarly.

Be Mindful Where You Sell

Take extra care when deciding where to place the location of your stores. Be mindful what type of people are at this location. Traditionally, Luxury Brand stores have been in big cities and on high street. However, this also attracts people that are not part of your target audience. With e-commerce as the dominating sales channel, it‘s no longer necessary to be everywhere. As an alternative, you could also use a niche location strategy and go where your target customers hang out and spend their leisure time.

Be Innovative

Innovation is another corner stone of luxury brands. You might think an industry dominated with craftsmanship is not innovative because of the traditional production processes they use but you would be completely wrong. Because they are many different ways to innovate in luxury.

1. One: You could use a material that’s not considers luxury at the moment.
2. Second: You could market to an audience that is not a traditional luxury customer
3. Third: You can innovate on the level of product design and style
4. Four: You could innovate in your distribution strategy
5. You could innovate on the product category and niche.
6. You could innovate on the design of the marketing/branding

As you can see, there are many different ways to innovate in luxury.

Establish A Style Or Design

All luxury brands and famous brands in general are famous for ONE THING. Here are some examples:

1. Apple is famous for their iPhone
2. Hermès is famous for their Birkin and Kelly Bags
3. Dior is famous for their Saddle Bag
4. AP is famous for their Royal Oak
5. And on and on.

You need a product that stands out across all your other products you sell and attracts the audience to your brand. In short: You need an iconic product. A classic that makes your brand the talk of the town.

Invest In Quality

Quality is a must for any luxury brand. Quality is one of the factors that justify the price of the product. It’s what sets products apart form competitors and ensures long term attraction by your audience. Luxury customers aren’t after cheap products. They can have it on every corner if they want. Cheap products however don’t create emotional affection or feelings, and it doesn’t make client’s loyal to your brand. Quite the opposite actually. Which is why you need to invest in quality. Quality is created by excelling in every aspect of your brand and delivering what clients demand from you. It’s always about flawless execution. See number one above.

Be Believable

Luxury Brands must be authentic and reliable. You need to be old fashion in some way and keep your word. I know this isn’t trendy but luxury isn’t about trends. It’s about style and timelessness. Only if you keep your words and keep up your consistency high, you are able to earn the trust of your audience and other stakeholders.

A common trend for luxury brands I see right now, is that they are cutting corners in different places. Which is a mistake. I see this especially in regards to packaging. They use cheap packaging and boxes from manufactures in cheap labour countries and it really affects the quality of of their brand experience. Remember a brand is not simply about the product. It’s about the experience of your entire eco-system.

The thing to considers is this. Everyone sees the lack in quality. Do you think your customers don’t notice or don’t care? What is the message you put out if you do this? The problem is, in the short term, you will save some money. In the long term however, the perception of the quality of your brand suffers a great deal. That’s because if a brand is willing to compromise on quality on one place, clients automatically start to assume your quality is not up to their standards in other areas of your company. Product quality perhaps?

This creates trust issues wich are not easy to overcome. If you want to be luxury, you need to commit to excellence. No matter what. And this must be in every area of your brand and business. From design, to production, to product quality, to marketing, customer service, your workforce, brand experience, boutique design, distributions strategy and more. Only an unwavering commitment to excellence gives you the result you are after. Yes, this involves cost, but being able to make your own prices, makes it possible to still make a healthy profit. Remember Luxury is about abundance and affluence. Not cutting corners and being cheap.

Creating Luxury Brand Logos:

• Display an Idea or Origin:
  Luxury brand logos should display an idea the brand stands for or are inspired by their origin. Luxury brand logos shouldn’t be too literal and show exactly what they do. A Logos job is to identify the brand and evoke the feeling the brand wants to evoke in its target audience.
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• Monograms
  Monograms are another great way to create logos for your brand. This is ideal for brands who are founder-led and have the name of their founders.
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• Classic and Timeless Design
  Luxury is about timelessness. Why you may ask? Classic and Timeless guarantee That a product is valuable over a long period of time and this give a luxury brand more power to dictate the price of their goods. Also, while trends quickly fade and get boring, luxury remains interesting and valuable. Luxury's relevance and value turn them into ideal investment pieces. Classic designs are an excellent way to display taste.
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• Beautiful Typefaces
  Typography is almost 90% of Design. If you invest in good quality typefaces, it will make ALL the difference for your brand identity. First of, most brands and businesses are reluctant to invest in good typefaces because it’s expensive and creates licensing questions. However, nothing speaks quality and an elevated state of being than using a high-quality typeface. Typography is an excellent way to stand out among the competition that is still afraid to make that investment. It also future proofs your design, because classic and timeless typefaces are always in style.
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• Strong Saturated Colors
  Luxury Brands usually use strong saturated colors that are vibrant and stand out. And for good reasons. They not only look classic and beautiful, they also make sure you are getting noticed in the market place. These colors also work perfectly with classic and timeless typefaces.

Luxury Design Secrets:

• Whitespace
  Luxury brands use lot’s of whitespace. Whitespace makes design look lighter and more premium. Adding to a sophisticated brand experience.
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• Neutral Colors + Brand Color = Success
  Neutral colors make people calm and relaxed. Combine them with your brand color for maximum effect. This is due mainly through contrast. Don’t mix your brand colors with too many others. Your brand image will suffer.
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• Use Symmetry
  Symmetry is the fastest way to display authority through design. You can get inspired by classic greek or roman architecture and how they designed with symmetry and structure to build beautiful buildings.
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• High Quality Typefaces
  High Quality Typefaces with refined shapes make your brand stand out.
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• Classic Layout
  Classic Layout techniques create beautiful creatives.
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• Close Up and Zoomed in Images and Photography
  Closed up images make your ads and other design look more refined and professional.
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• Rule of Third
  The Rule of Third is not only useful in Photography, it can also be used to create iconic layouts and design.
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• Light Fonts
  Light fonts are very common for luxury brands. They make your brand appear more premium and refined. Stick to sans-serifs for a modern look and best results.

Balancing Resource Limitations During Market Presence Expansion:

A common challenge for luxury brands that are starting out are resource limitations. Here are some actionable strategies on what you can do to get traction in the market.

1. Focus on the essentials
   Focus on one craft, one product and one category. Build a few prototypes and products and make it perfect. One perfect product is worth more that 1000 average ones. Your goal when starting out as a luxury brand shouldn't be to grow as quickly as possible, it should be to acquire the first round of customers to gain traction in the market.y
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2. Prioritize Marketing and Brand-awareness
   Getting attention and building brand awareness is one of the key tasks a luxury entrepreneur has to accomplish in the early phases of his/her luxury startup.‍
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3. ‍Look for a sparing partner
   Look our for someone who can offer good advice and has experience in your industry.

Measuring Luxury Brand Success:

1. Public Interest and Publicity
   You can look at the public interest and how often your brand is mentioned in the media
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2. Sales
   You can measure success through revenue and profit.
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3. Desirability
   You can measure the desirability of your brand by measuring the amount of customer service enquiries and website visits.
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4. Customer Life Time Value
   Customer Life Time Value gives you a good indication how much your clients think about your brand and purchase from you.
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5. Brand Engagement and Share-ability
   You can measure brand engagement on your digital channels like social media.
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6. Pedestrian Traffic to Store locations
   Interest in pedestrian traffic can be a measurement of interest in your brand, but it doesn't necessarily mean higher sales or higher customer acquisition.
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7. Stock valuation
   You can look at your stock valuation and how much external investors value your brand

Sources:

• The Luxury Strategy by Jean-Noël Kapferer
• Bernard Arnault Full Q&A on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EhNKy5yNIgs

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