Blog of laurent Dusausoy, it's all about branding and brand equity

By Laurent Dusausoy

LUXURY HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH FASHION AND PREMIUM SEGMENTS

You, like me, from time to time, we see people marvel at a window of a shop and say, "what a luxurious brand!" (although a poster "promotion" is put on the front of the store :-)).

What are the common points between Hermes and Hugues Desnoyer ?
How can we define what is luxury?
In this article I will try to define what can be considered as luxury and highlight its key features.
We will make a comparizon between luxury, fashion and premium brands and analyse in details the common pillars of any luxury brand.

#1 luxury is neither fashion nor premium!

Despite some "easy" point of view (but also true - see video), in order to determinate whether a brand is luxury or not, it is important to know the differences between the high-end segment, the fashion segment and luxury segment.

The premium segment is easy to determinate: "The more you pay, the more you get". You want another option for your car, you pay for it and you get it ! So premium segment is about quality level, it's a link between price value and product value. That's all.

The fashion segment is something else: "Fashion is about short time and communauty". Today you want (like everyone else) the "hit tee-shirt" inspired by a famous designer, but in 3 months you will see your prefered (same) tee-shirt sold with 30-50% discount on a private sales website.
So fashion segment is closer to "social tribal"attitudes, with short lifetime. It's in fact ephemeral: Fashion by definition will be (in short term) old fashioned.
Fashion is on the opposite of a self reward: that is only a way to feel yourself in accordance with social habits or other people.
Fashion is also linked with delocalisation (mainly) on the contrary of the luxury industry (mainly).

So what is luxury ?
Luxury is like a religion where consumers are ready to pay for a product itself completely disconnected with product value. For ex, do you really think that a future buyer of the last Ferrari model is asking why the brand has increased its prices by 10% since last year? Do you believe that Louis Vuitton' sales members have to explain the rise of their prices ? Never: Luxury goods have seen their prices rise by 800% between 1976 and 2012, against 300% for other consumer goods.

Luxury has nothing to do with short term sales (and products), luxury is timeless and based on culture, country soft power, heritage and of course...history. Just, take an example: the World Luxury Association publishes annually the 100 world best luxury brands. For the finewatches industry, 10 brands are recognized as best luxury brands (Patek, Vacheron Constantin, Piaget, Jaeger-Lecoultre, Audemars Piguet, Blancpain, Rolex, Breguet, IWC and Franck Muller). The average of date of birth for these 10 brands is....1850! All these brands have been created either in Switzerland, either in France through a business family.

See more? (click to enlarge):

(TO BE CONTINUED)