The Luxury Strategy: Break the Rules of Marketing to Build Luxury Brands

This brings us back to Chapter 1, and to the goal of this book: clarifying concepts. To make things simple: the luxury strategy is resilient, but the luxury market as a whole is not resilient. Only the brands managed under the strict rules of the luxury strategy are crisis-proofed.

When it comes to luxury, being unique is what counts, not any comparison with a competitor. Luxury is the expression of a taste, of a creative identity, of the intrinsic passion of a creator; luxury makes the bald statement ‘this is what I am’, not ‘that depends’ – which is what positioning implies.

The brand must do everything possible to appear exclusive, even if exclusivity never appears as a factor in surveys regarding what is most appealing about luxury.

Democratization

The immediate consequence is that the price is not defined on the basis of a ‘cost-plus’-type method, through addition of the costs, but conversely you begin with the price in order to construct the product (in the broader sense). It is similar to reverse engineering, in which both the functional part and the part of a dream, the basis of the symbo

What will increase their cost is a rarity that we may describe as virtual, with which they must be imbued. Asked about his role, Bernard Fornas, the CEO of Cartier International, replied: ‘I have to manage the desirability of this house, it is necessary to maintain the ratio of availability to rarity’ (Air France Magazine, August 2007). For availab

Relocation means denying one of the fundamentals of luxury: cultural specificity. This is one of the major points of divergence at the product level between luxury and premium. A luxury product is linked to a history, a territory (physical or cultural) from which it cannot be extracted without losing its aura. A premium product is linked to a stric

This market has three strong, original and structuring characteristics. You do not communicate about the scent

In France, people were facing a double issue: recycling was less a habit there than in Germany for cultural reasons, and French people generally suspect their industry of unfairness. So the French decided to go further: everyone was informed that the profit gained from recycling will be totally paid to a cancer charity: the ‘Ligue contre le cancer’