What Becomes a Luxury Brand Most?
Running glossy ads featuring a hot celeb in upscale magazines, a la Blackglama’s “What Becomes a Legend Most?” campaign, is not enough to ensure the longevity of a luxury brand, argues Pamela Danziger of Unity Marketing.
“In luxury marketing there is a subtle interplay between three factors that most strongly influence the luxury consumer to buy: product brand, dealer or store’s brand or service providers’ reputation, and price/value relationship,” Danziger writes in her book “Let Them Eat Cake: Marketing Luxury to the Masses—As Well As the Classes.” In fact, she found that advertisements were the least influential purchase drivers among the luxury buyers she surveyed.
Rather than focus on measuring the brand awareness of a luxury company, Danziger says that measuring customer loyalty is far more significant a metric regarding “the success or failure of corporate strategy to connect with the luxury consumer.”
In her study of product categories, Danziger found that automobiles, electronics, kitchenware/cookware, watches, tabletop items, and fragrances and beauty products engendered above-average brand loyalty. Jewelry, home furnishings and soft goods, and apparel had lower-than-average levels of brand loyalty among consumers. These “signify luxury categories where opportunities abound for new luxury branding strategies because the competitive playing field is virtually open,” Danziger says.
And while some consumers of luxury brands buy items solely because the brand carries a perceived cachet, Danziger contends that such buyers are the minority: “You rarely find a luxury consumer saying, ‘I am going to buy this bag because it is by Louis Vuitton.’ Rather, you are much more likely to hear, ‘I am going to buy this bag because I really love it, and it is by Louis Vuitton so it costs more, but it is worth it.’ ”
Also contrary to popular belief, exclusivity is not the primary determinant of a luxury brand. “Exclusivity, in and of itself, brings very little luxury value to today’s democratically minded luxury consumer,” Danziger writes. “That said, th luxury consumer also yearns for more specialness in their experience of luxuries… So the challenge for luxury marketers in the American luxury market is to deliver greater exclusivity by making the luxury consumer feel special and unique, but never let it morph into class snobbishness or arrogance.”
How to do that? Danziger lists five key elements to creating or polishing a luxury brand:
• The brand must be “expansive”—full of opportunities for the marketer and the consumer. • The brand must tell a story. • The brand must be relevant to the consumers’ needs. • The brand must align with consumers’ values. • The brand must perform.
