Luxury, Lies and Marketing: Shattering the Illusions of the Luxury Brand

214 Pages·2013·1.36 MB·English

by  Marie-Claude Sicard (auth.)

Luxury, Lies and Marketing
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Luxury, Lies and
Marketing
Shattering the Illusions of the
Luxury Brand
By Marie-Claude Sicard
Translated by Trevor Cribben Merill
© Marie-Claude Sicard 2013
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2013 978-1-137-26468-8
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this
publication may be made without written permission.
No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted
save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence
permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency,
Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS.
Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication
may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this
work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published 2013 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN
Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke,
Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN 978-1-349-44307-9 ISBN 978-1-137-26469-5 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9781137264695
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully
managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing
processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the
country of origin.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
Typeset by MPS Limited, Chennai, India.
C
ONTENTS
List of Figures vii
Introduction viii
Chapter 1 Doing Away with Some Received Ideas 1
Are We Sure We Know What We’re Talking About? 1
French Luxury: An Ego as Big as the Ritz 3
A Neglected History 4
On the Art of Denying One’s Mother 7
Going Back Still Further 9
The Origin of European Luxury: Court Society 12
And on the Paternal Side? 15
Luxury’s Quest for Meaning 20
False Ancestors 22
The Limping Devil 23
Luxury is Always a Swerve 25
The Three “Swerves” of Luxury 27
Chapter 2 International Luxury: The Clash
of Cultures 36
Two Visions of Luxury 36
The Pyramid 37
The Galaxy 42
Two Models, Two Societies 46
The Classical and the Baroque 48
A Work in Progress 51
W hen the Erosion of the Industrial Model Reaches
Luxury Brands 54
Invisible Luxury 57
New Brands on the Horizon? 58
Chapter 3 How Luxury Brands Work 64
Being (or Not) a Luxury Brand 64
Defining Luxury: Insufficient Criteria 65
One Luxury, or Three Luxuries? 72
A Brand is an Impression 77
The Fingerprint Method 79
■ The Physical or Body Pole 81
■ The Temporal Pole 89
■ The Spatial Pole 94
v
Contents
vi
■ The Norms Pole 100
■ The Positions Pole 109
■ The Projects Pole 114
■ The Relations Pole 124
What Does the Future Hold? 135
The Slider Console 144
Ralph Lauren: A Luxury Brand? 147
The Summary of Summaries 150
The Brand Value Ladder 152
Going Up and Down 156
Marketing and Luxury: The Big Misunderstanding 158
A Paradoxical Form of Marketing? 162
Down with Luxury Marketing? 166
Conclusion 169
Notes 182
Index 188
L F
IST OF IGURES
1 The Pyramid 38
2 The Galaxy 43
3 The Brand Fingerprint 80
4 Slider Console for Cartier 146
5 Slider Console for Ralph Lauren 147
vii
I
NTRODUCTION
The book you’ve just opened is not a marketing book of the kind
you’re perhaps accustomed to reading.
Rest assured, you’ll find lots of information, numerous luxury
brands, and tables and charts, as well as an analytical method—
but that’s not all. You’ll also find anecdotes and reflections about
the history of luxury, a digression by way of linguistics to help
define the concept, other digressions via sociology and art his-
tory, and comparisons among the various forms of luxury, past and
p resent. And all of this so thoroughly mixed together that if you’re
a hardcore marketing fanatic, honesty compels me to warn you that
you’ll be frustrated.
Why fly in the face of all the rules of business literature in this
way?
First of all because there are already many excellent marketing
textbooks devoted to luxury. What’s the point of restating what
everybody else has said? The only justification for another book on
the subject is that this one offers another point of view and speaks
in a different tone.
Secondly because I don’t believe in the compartmentalization
of disciplines or in the existence or validity of “pure” marketing,
assuming that such a beast even exists. Marketing is nothing with-
out the whole range of social sciences to which it belongs.
Above all, I think that, when talking about luxury, interdisciplin-
arity is not only enlightening but unavoidable. One can master the
marketing of beer or sneakers and be unaware of the history of beer
or sports and their major political, social, and economic aspects.
One should be in sync with the immediate needs of the market. In
luxury, this is impossible.
Managers looking for rapid results, or students enrolled in one
of the innumerable training seminars on luxury marketing that have
sprouted up like mushrooms over the last few years in every corner
of the globe—all of them are on the wrong path when they seek
recipes for success that are instantly profitable and applicable to
the problems they’re facing or their professional projects. Lacking
a real culture of luxury, they condemn themselves to u nderstanding
viii
Introduction
ix
only the surface, and, more precisely, those facets of the surface
they’re able to imitate. Of course, imitation is a stage that one has
to go through when learning about a subject, but it cannot be the
basis for a brand strategy, in luxury or anywhere else. For if a brand
is fundamentally a difference, in luxury it’s a difference raised to
the power of two. Either differentiation is scrupulously respected,
or else you leave brand logic behind.
Anyone who tries to imitate the way such and such a Swiss
watchmaking brand does business, for example, hoping to rapidly
achieve the same success, is going to run afoul of the reality prin-
ciple. Following a given business model or marketing strategy to
the letter won’t do much good. To attain the same level of quality
and acquire the same reputation, you would have to have a lot of
money, hire the best specialists, and, above all, have a lot of time
on your hands. Assuming that all these conditions were met, you’d
still be far from the goal: you might as well try to fashion a tree
out of a trunk and some branches. You might be able to make a
convincing replica of a tree, but no matter how good an imitation
the tree is, if it doesn’t have roots it’s not a tree. The first storm that
comes along will knock it down, and storms are a constant in the
highly turbulent luxury sector.
The roots of Swiss watchmaking cannot be imitated. They are
too old, too deep, and, above all, they are religious, as is the case
whenever you dig down into the deepest layers of luxury.1
The proof? It’s not to be found in any marketing textbook, but in
the history of Geneva.
Paradoxically, it was by banning luxury in the 16th century that
Calvin jumpstarted an industry that still dominates the world stage
today. Until then the city was home to a few highly regarded silver-
smiths; but the influx of Protestant refugees who had come from
all over Europe to escape persecution, combined with the severity
of the new laws introduced by Calvin, resulted in the artisan silver-
smiths converting to a business that was less ostentatious but more
in sync with the era, namely clockmaking.
Calvinist Geneva was, like its founder, obsessed with time, time
which belongs only to God, and to whom it must therefore be entirely
devoted. How to avoid losing or wasting it? By making it possible
for everyone to watch it going by. Clocks were installed all over the
city, so the hour and length of the church services and sermons could