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Kapferer on Luxury

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Kapferer on Luxury

How Luxury Brands Can Grow Yet Remain Rare

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Luxury brands require and create new growth strategies in the face of an enviable problem: too much demand.

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8

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  • Innovative

Recommendation

Only a privileged few can afford a Rolls Royce, Hermès Kelly bag or Patek Philippe watch. Luxury products serve the extremely wealthy. They connote status, prestige and exclusivity. Their high prices once held ordinary shoppers at bay. Today, however, mass-market buyers demand access to the products they see their favorite celebrities using on TV and in movies. Luxury expert Jean-Noël Kapferer addresses the luxury sector’s growth challenges in this compilation combining previous articles and new essays to build on his companion volume, The Luxury Strategy. While redundancy and repetition may blunt the rewards of reading Kapferer from cover to cover, getAbstract recommends his insights to students of economic trends as well as luxury-brand investors, managers, marketers and sellers.

Summary

The Growth Conundrum

Luxury faces a unique challenge. Growth is a problem. The primary trait of luxury is exclusivity, the opposite of growth. Luxury brands don’t want more customers; they want the right customers, people who appreciate their offerings and can afford them. That’s why Rolls Royce will make fewer custom-crafted cars in 2016 than in 2015, but Mercedes will build more S-Class models.

When people buy luxury, they don’t merely purchase an excellent product. They’re also buying physical symbols of wealth as well as entrée into the rarefied atmosphere of privilege. The ability to make these purchases and own coveted objects connotes class, taste and social status. Luxury marketers must find the sweet spot between having too few customers to support their business and too many, since mass popularity will dilute their brand and compromise its luxury image.

Publicly held luxury groups own many formerly independent family companies, such as Bulgari and Gucci. Wall Street pressures these public companies to show continued growth. To date, luxury groups have achieved such growth by creating second- and third-tier lines, by diversifying and by expanding worldwide...

About the Author

An expert on the luxury industry, Jean-Noël Kapferer is co-author of The Luxury Strategy.

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