When a luxury company sets out to create an object of desire – not an experience, but an actual item, like a piece of jewelry, a handbag, or a coat – how do they do it successfully? If there’s no new technology, no new performance enhancement, no functional reason for a new purchase, how does one create desire? Is there a formula? Or is it pure luck and serendipity?
Winter weight hanging around like snow that just refuses to melt? It might be time to kick-start your fitness routine with a trip to a destination spa. But which one? Where do the members of the C-Suite, high-net-worth class go when the beach, the red carpet, or the boardroom are calling and they have to lose a few pounds, pronto?
Luxury can be many things, but fully rational isn’t one of them. That’s why the data-driven trend in marketing is highly likely to fail in the irrational world of luxury. There’s a huge amount of scientific marketing chatter about Google algorithms, empirical quantitative research, media mix formulas, social media analytics and AI marketing metrics. It’s driven by the explosion of data at hand. Some estimates say that information is doubling every two years, due in part to the daily influx of 200 billion emails and the explosive growth of AI generated “news.”
The luxuries that are most engaging to me right now are the non-material ones. For me, luxury is all about having the opportunity to see and experience things that add meaning to my life, not just surrounding myself with stuff. I know many successful women share my view. When you can buy yourself anything, you think twice about acquiring luxurious objects for their own sake. I now take luxury in spending time with the people important to me, in magical places, and supporting the causes and craftspeople who align with my values. That’s not to say that I never want to buy beautiful things! It’s just that I want to understand their origin, and ideally I want them to stand for something. That has led me away from big corporate brands and toward individual artists. Part of the luxury of purchasing their work is knowing the authentic stories behind what they create. For example, I am lucky to know the founders of two my favorite jewelry brands, Bowen NYC and Foundrae, both based here in New York. These …
Have you noticed that all of a sudden the decision to make your bed every morning or not has become a litmus test for the kind of person you are? It’s actually a Thing now.
