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Marketing luxury brands require more sophisticated and specific strategic tactics than traditional marketing strategies. The digital marketing strategies implemented by luxury brands are consistently expanding in the digital age to maintain their positioning and keep their target audience. This means finding ways to communicate and distribute not just their products but also their messaging.
The Fundamentals of Luxury Branding
There are too many fundamentals of building a luxury brand to cover in a blog post, consider this more of a primer. A luxury brand doesn’t just become a luxury brand because a founder calls it that or comes up with an elegant logo, colors, or product. Before considering the components that make up a luxury brand, let’s see what the term ‘luxury’ means.
The term “luxury” is defined as an abundance of great comfort and lavish living. More specifically, all luxury items have four key elements: high quality, high price point, scarcity, and heritage.
Everyday brands that are classified as “premium” or “mass consumer” are categorized in terms of quality and desirability. A premium brand would have a high price and be of high quality. A mass-consumer brand has a low to average price point and decent quality.
For example, the new iPhone comes out, and the price is high, the quality is excellent, and the brand heritage is there as well, but is it scarce or exclusive? This example is more of a premium brand selling a premium product to whoever wants or is willing to pay for it. In contrast, if you were to take 50 people to a Gucci store to buy the same bag, they may not have enough for even half of that amount.
Premium brands are not luxury brands; they lack exclusivity and many other fundamental components that make up a genuine luxury brand. Luxury goods may have premium counterparts designed for the mass market, but you’ll generally know a high-end luxury product when you see it.
One of the many common traits that luxury brands are known for is their strong sense of brand identity and affinity. Although there are various ways to form a brand identity, we believe that a successful luxury brand consists of the following four fundamental elements:
Brand Heritage
For a brand to successfully connect with its target audience, it’s essential to communicate its heritage—where did the brand come from, and how did it evolve?
For luxury and very few premium brands, brand heritage is integral in creating and amplifying the brand’s desirability. These brands take their heritage and ensure all marketing and brand strategies are based upon it.
Louis Vuitton is an excellent example of a brand that attracted a large following through brand heritage to achieve desirability. Louis Vuitton was a 16-year-old boy who decided to travel to Paris on foot; after working in the packaging industry for 17 years, he was hired by Napoleon III’s wife as her packager and box maker, thus resulting in his level of clientele: royalty and the elite.
The most important part of this story is that even after his passing, Louis Vuitton’s legacy stayed and continued to grow, along with his brand. When consumers gain an emotional attachment to a relatable or aspirational story, it helps the brand build a strong connection through its identity. The importance of brand heritage to luxury brands can’t be understated.
It’s also important to mention that brand heritage isn’t the same as a brand story. A new brand can have a story, but it would need to be around for decades to have a heritage and legacy.
Brand Values
All brands, luxury, premium, or every day, have values. Values are guiding principles and beliefs that shape a brand’s personality, products, and how they operate.
Going back to brand heritage, a brand consistently living up to guiding principles and beliefs for 50–100 years says a lot. Brand values typically originate from the founder of a brand, and the best brands try to stay as consistent with those original values as possible. However, knowing when and what to pivot as a society and culture changes is also essential.
A luxury brand is distinguished by common values like quality, exclusivity, handmade, passion, and timelessness. To effectively demonstrate these values to your target audience, your brand must take action to pursue endeavors that showcase these values. By committing to your brand’s values, you are committing to satisfying your customer’s needs; therefore, creating a strong character and identity in line with your brand’s heritage.
Brand Image
After establishing the internal elements of your brand, it’s time to focus on the exterior appearance of the brand’s identity. Brand image is how consumers perceive your brand from the outside looking in.
It is crucial to determine how a brand relates to cultural, social, and even political factors that can significantly influence its image. A great example is the number of luxury companies stepping away from using real fur in their jackets.
Many luxury brands go through a period of societal and cultural shifts. The digital age has changed the rate at which brands have to be able to adapt to cultural shifts, which is why many luxury brands didn’t shift for 95% of their existence.
A keynote for luxury brands is to present your brand in a way that aligns with your heritage, values, and target demographic. This means communicating your brand with a high level of integrity and respecting your brand but not revering it. Brands are meant to evolve with the times; this doesn’t mean they’re straying from the values that made them what they are.
Marketing for Luxury Brands
Luxury marketing strategies follow some of the traditional rules of marketing based on the 4Ps (price, place, promotion, and product). We’ve already discussed the price and product, specifically the quality and craftsmanship of the product. Let’s touch on the place and promotion through three key points:
Create a sense of exclusivity through scarcity
Creating scarcity was typically done through the place, one of the 4Ps in the marketing mix. Place in terms of scarcity refers to where and how someone can purchase a product or service. Where can you find a bottle of your favorite soda? Pretty much everywhere. Where can you find your favorite Burberry or Chanel bag? Most likely only at one of the designer brand’s locations or 1-2 luxury boutiques. Not only that, but these stores often carry a limited supply of new products.
In the age of eCommerce and the proliferation of online shoppers, many brands now employ “product drops” or waiting lists to create scarcity. Product drops are when a brand releases a limited number of products, and once they sell out, they’re gone. This is a great marketing campaign for some brands, but it’s important to tread carefully and not create too much artificial scarcity that you anger the same luxury consumers you’re hoping to attract.
Influencer marketing
As mentioned in this article, many of the founders of today’s luxury brands rose to prominence by creating their products for royalty, elite, or celebrity A-listers. Over the last 100 years, luxury brands may not have made their products exclusively for royalty, but they still have celebrity A-listers, people in the public eye, and influencers with tons of subscribers thanks to social media.
Luxury brands focus on aspirational marketing, a tactic used to play on our desires through advertising to communicate that the product will fulfill our need for status, lifestyle, and dreams. In the most basic example, if your favorite celebrity or social media influencer wears a specific brand (let’s say Rolex, for example), you might not be able to be that individual, but you could get a little closer by aspiring to wear or purchase the same brand.
This is the basis of influencer marketing. We see influencers we follow daily using high-end products, we admire those products, and then come to yearn for those same brands. Millennials and Gen Z consumers, in particular, are especially receptive to this type of social media marketing.
Brand management across social media
Brand management is essential for all brands, but the level of detail that goes into managing a luxury or big brand is extensive.
You don’t often see most luxury brands running advertisements or PPC ads on many social media platforms, you will see them in magazines, but that’s pretty much it. Because of this, many luxury brands didn’t adopt social media as fast as non-luxury brands. This plays on the scarcity principle, limiting access to the luxury brand, but many luxury brands are now focusing on becoming more inclusive or being exclusive while being inclusive.
Luxury brands can be active on social media; they just have a much more delicate line of the types of content they share, how often they share, and their engagement strategy. Finding the right balance between creating that exclusive allure and encouraging community building is essential.
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Embrace The Uniqueness Of Luxury Brand Marketing Strategies
We hope this post has provided you with a reasonable amount of information you need to help you reach your luxury brand goals. As demonstrated, building a luxury or even a premium brand isn’t something that happens overnight. Building brand awareness takes time; over time, how a brand is marketed, managed, and communicated with the target audience will dictate what type of brand it evolves into–an everyday, premium, or luxury brand.