LVMH and the Luxury Strategy

People buying premium or even super-premium like to justify every dollar by a return on investment. Premium means pay more, get more in functional benefits. Luxury is elsewhere: it signals the capacity of the buyer to transcend needs, functions, or objective benefits.

The exceptional (sometimes criticized) margins at Louis Vuitton did not arise from excessively high prices, but from the removal of all costs and damages due to intermediaries. Louis Vuitton’s competitiveness

was therefore structural”

Bernard himself continuously expresses that ‘creating desire’ is the most important part of what they are doing at LVMH

According to Kapferer, “luxury is superlative, not comparative”. The beauty of luxury is that no one can definitively say whether a Louis Vuitton bag is better than an Hermes bag because that concept doesn’t even make sense