As we have said elsewhere in this magazine, so-called luxury is about a combination of high level skills and competence, cultural awareness (on the side of both the producer and the consumer) and heritage.
According to this interpretation, the term luxury does no longer indicate something expensive which draws boundaries between those who and those who cannot afford them, but conveys the meaning of goods whose value relies on their being unique, timeless and unreplicable.
As Vincent Bastien (2015) explains in his contribution on Marketing to High End Consumer, “Luxury brands are cultural forces. Luxury is about taste education. This is why it flirts so much with art, avant-garde art. Luxury brands do not aim at being popular (that is to say, liked by everybody today), but instead aim at setting the long lasting standards of taste for tomorrow”.
Therefore, rather than constituting an intrinsic quality of luxury goods, high price is the result of a combination of the high level skills and competence that are required to design and produce them, cultural awareness and heritage. To put it differently, high price is not the defining quality of luxury goods, which I prefer to call high-quality goods, but some sort of a secondary effect.
Because of their nature, high-quality goods need totally different marketing strategies from consumer market. Let us explore this issue in depth.
Since consumer marketing is necessarily comparative, comparative tools like, say, the SWAT analysis are essential in the positioning of such goods on the market and in determining what to improve to gain competitive advantage.
Furthermore, as the ability to understand the market’s sentiment and answering customer’s needs and want is key in driving sales, consumer marketing implies a progressive regression to the mean. In fact, the relationship between quality and price (the highest quality at the best available price) is pivotal in determining the attractiveness of consumer products, for it is what customers value the most.
Things do not change much when it comes to fashion marketing. As Bastien argues, fashion “sells by being fashionable, which is to say, a very perishable value”.
Differently from both consumer and fashion market, hight quality goods are non-negotiable. Luxury marketing strategies do not need either to pander consumer’s needs and wants to increase sales, or to explore the market’s sentiment to fulfil the business’ aims in terms of positioning.
As we said above, the value of high-quality goods relies on the combination of high level skills and competence, heritage and cultural awareness. Hence on their uniqueness, timelessness and non-negotiability, just like a Picasso’s work of art or the Sistine Chapel.
High-quality goods are non-essential goods that sell dreams and emotions. In doing this, whether we like or not, high-quality goods help shaping and reinforcing one’s identity and awareness. So, their value relies on their capacity to answer this need of self-recognition.
This is the reason why luxury marketing can be successfully employed to market non-luxury items, as the example of Apple demonstrates. In fact, we someone’s decides to buy an Apple rather than, say, a Samsung devise, she / he does this because of Apple’s power to answer self-elevation needs. Those who purchase an Apple devise cease to be just customers, as they perceive themselves as members of the ‘Apple community’ whose identity gets to coincide with the sets of values and meanings the brand conveys.
Yet, the simple employment of luxury marketing does not automatically entail the ‘positioning’ of a product on the luxury market. A poor product will always remain a poor product, no matter the marketing strategies.
What this means is that high-level skills and competences, hence superlative quality, are tangible elements whose absence cannot be counterbalanced or disguised by any marketing strategy.
Product, that is to say a high-quality product, is the primary marketing tool. Without skills, competence and culture, there can be no quality. Without quality no marketing strategy can work, as brands just die.
Antonio Desiderio