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50 thoughts on luxury.
/50
#2 Luxury like magic, art & religion is a way to connect the individual to their idealized self.
#4 Luxury begins when a tangible object is transformed into the icon of an intangible idea.
#5 Luxury brands should commit to depth & values, over hollowness & hype.
#6 Luxury advertising is suffering from superlative fatigue. In a post-recessionary market, less is increasingly more.
#7 Disney has a huge amount to teach luxury brands about converting stories into revenue streams.
#8 Luxury brands need to rediscover their own identity internally, not to outsource the search to the wisdom of crowds.
#9 Luxury brands dont need to feel old & stupid around social media. After all, they were the original social media.
#10 Luxury used to be at the centre of all great cultural rituals. It needs to restore its ritual tradition.
#12 Luxury can only see as far forward as it can remember back.
#13 If luxury brands dont incarnate a cultural truth, they become just empty, expensive products.
#14 Luxury survives precisely by being reinvented & reimagined; there is no other option.
#15 Successful communication strategy is about converting the brands story into the consumers story.
#16 Luxury brands invariably lose the truth by hunting for the facts.
#17 Best practices of communitybuilding and loyalty for luxury brands can be adopted and adapted from religion, cults and secret societies.
#18 The new strategic relationship between luxury and museum culture can represent salvation for both.
#19 Luxury consumers are in search of something more fundamental than keeping up with the Zeta-Joneses; they want something to believe in & something to belong to.
#20 Luxury brands that dont learn from history will be forced to repeat it; new luxury - for example - is at least as old as Voltaire.
#23 In order to survive, luxury needs better access to skills & talents currently working outside the luxury industry.
#24 Luxury should feel visceral & vertiginous. Ideally, at the same time.
#25 Luxury needs to author cultural change, not try to follow it.
#26 Luxury brands need to offer deeper community engagement, not just higher community status.
#27 The Venice Biennale - & other approved venues of luxury inspiration are not the only places to look.
#28 Luxury brands need to find a more functional relationship with the past; one which is neither over-dependent nor disconnected.
#29 Luxury involves rarity; innovation the pursuit of new rarity needs to be a redoubled goal for all luxury brands.
#30 Luxury brands should overcome their intimacy issues, & go to meet the consumers who sponsor their survival.
#32 Without more emotional impact, the great brand cathedrals of luxury are starting to seem a bit cold.
#34 Luxury brands operate in an unstable economic marketplace. Fortunately, they also operate in a more controllable marketplace for meaning.
#35 Luxury brands are belief systems, & part of a multi-faith universe.
#36 Luxury is about subtracting the ordinary & adding the meaningful.
#37 Luxury needs to be more magical, hardcore, provocative, radical, mischievous, shameless & ambitious.
#39 Digital strategy represents a way to communicate great ideas in luxury, not a solution in itself.
#40 Luxury brands succeed when they manifest the there-and-then as the here-and-now.
#41 Luxury is about finding the right mix between utter simplicity & overwhelming majesty.
#42 Luxury brands need to sell the individual denomination, not the overall religion of luxury.
#43 The Comit Colbert is increasingly part of the problem, not part of the solution.
#45
21st Century luxury = strategy +
chaos magic.
#47 Hip-hop taught luxury to move. Sustainability taught luxury to feel. China is teaching luxury to think.
#48 Like design, storytelling is a key way for luxury brands to distinguish themselves in a crowded marketplace.
#49 Luxury brands, like myths, are stories expressing fundamental values.
#50 Its time for luxury brands to take back the cultural revolution they created.