What is Luxury Marketing?
Dos and Don’t of Luxury Marketing
Luxury marketing is truly an art, as here you need people to buy stuff they don’t really need and that needs convincing them creatively. While luxury marketing does sound glamorous, it takes a high level of skill to market the product and a high level of commitment to understand the people you want to target and how you can carefully place your product as something they can’t resist investing in. So before diving into the Dos and Don'ts of luxury marketing, let us first understand what luxury marketing is.
What is Luxury?
Luxury is a term we use to describe high- end product, goods and services and the luxury industry is typically considered to be rare, aesthetically pleasing, and expensive. An industry as big as this, brings products in all shapes and sizes. From a small jewelry piece to resorts and cars, luxury appeals to the high-end audience.
If we look back, we’ll notice that luxury can be traced back to ancient times when objects such as jewels were used to distinguish people and set them apart as the higher class or elites. So luxury as a concept has been carried on from ages and is characterized as products or services that are high quality and exclusive.
What is luxury marketing
Once you understand what luxury is, understating luxury marketing as a concept is simple. Luxury marketing is selling and promoting high-end products, while luxury marketing does focus on the elite, it also aims to target people who are willing to save and keen to save up for luxury goods.
The 4E's of Luxury Marketing
- Emotions: Luxury brands excel by captivating customer emotions, cultivating desire, and fostering aspiration. This is achieved through compelling storytelling or aligning with customers' core values and beliefs.
- Exclusivity: The essence of exclusivity is achieved by making customers feel unique and valued. Luxury brands accomplish this through limited edition offerings, personalized services, and exclusive events accessible only through invitation.
- Experiences: Beyond products or services, luxury brands distinguish themselves by delivering memorable experiences. Immersive retail environments, tailor-made services, and engaging events contribute to the creation of value that extends beyond the tangible.
- Extensions: For luxury brands, the extension of their values and image goes beyond the confines of products and services. Strategies involve prestigious collaborations, forming alliances with other esteemed brands, and curating content that mirrors the brand's values and associated lifestyle.
So how do you crack the game of luxury?
- Take advantage of Visuals
When it comes to luxury marketing, make high quality visuals your best friend. With visuals that are appealing, evoking aspirational emotions becomes a cake walk and visual social networks like Pinterest can be the best mediums to raise brand awareness and advocacy.
One of the best examples of brands driven by advocacy can be Chanel, which doesn’t have an official account on Pinterest but it still is the most pinned brand. With over 1,244 pins, Chanel is all driven by their advocates. This means creating content that strikes the perfect balance and is aspirational and educational but not too promotional.
- Don’t ignore the story
A fundamental of luxury marketing is to market your story, rather than ignoring it. By explaining what your brand stands for, you can easily create advocacy for your brand and even give your product an emotional touch.
So go ahead and dive deep to communicate the story behind your product and explain the values that you stand for, so you can represent an assurance of style, luxury, performance and quality. Since the product you’re selling instantly becomes more appealing if it’s backed up by a unique story.
- Create aspirational and educational content
One of the most effective ways to generate traffic and create engagement is to create highly visual and aspirational content, which means content that is all about creating a lifestyle for your audience that aligns with their desires, values and goals. This means showcasing an achievable outcome that motivates them to take an action and achieve that goal.
While this is already pretty common in various other niches, content marketing is enormously effective for luxury marketing and is often underused as well.
- Don’t underestimate SEO
SEO is truly the untapped gold mine for luxury marketing, since Google channels are the main players in helping luxury shoppers to find products, learn more about the brand and make their purchase.
So if your website is SEO friendly, you can easily bring in a lot of traffic and revenue on the table. So use the common SEO activities for your advantage, such as using specific keywords and images to ensure higher rank on search engines.
- Create content that appeals to the desire
One of the main reasons why people talk about things and spread the world of mouth is because they want the traits they talk about to have in them. So make sure you focus on the primary motivation for buying luxury goods, that is displaying status.
Take advantage of this by creating content that is shareable and makes the person sharing it seem stylish, smart or cool amongst the masses.
- Don’t become ordinary
When it comes to luxury marketing, it all comes down to exclusivity and maintaining the consumer desire through scarcity and rarity. If any one could buy what you’re selling by walking into the store, then you’re doing luxury marketing wrong.
So make your products stand out with content as well as tactics, such as private member groups and loyalty perks.
While luxury marketing can be a tough nut to crack, we hope these Do’s and Don’ts help you navigate through the journey of marketing luxury products the right way, by reaching the right audience.