What's next for the ever-changing world of luxury?
As the festive season approaches, we see brands taking on the considerable challenge of injecting magic – yet more magic – into the everyday, wrapping mundane activities in layers of aspiration, even a sense of the epic. In many ways, this is what brands do best: tell stories that imbue products, and daily life, with lasting meaning and aspirational value. And this is what luxury brands excel at – so that each encounter with them feels a bit like Christmas.
One of the Christmas windows at luxury department store Harvey Nichols
But what is luxury? What stories do luxury brands tell their consumers? And are these stories changing?
Luxury is all about perceived value – the idea of getting more than functional utility, with luxury brands transmitting an aura of extraordinariness even for the most ordinary of products.
But as what we value as a society changes, so does the meaning of luxury, subject to subtle but continuous and significant shifts. In the 60s and 70s, the countercultural movement’s celebration of bohemianism and experimentation recoded the meaning of luxury to encompass novel values – ideals of artistry and ‘eccentric cool’. Such meanings were almost completely overturned in the 1980s as a ‘show-me-the-money culture’ began coding luxury as pure ‘material wealth’. Nowadays, as conceptions of success are becoming more personal and subjective, we increasingly value ideas of self-expression and fulfilment – associating luxury with personal enrichment.
Two major global forces are now challenging traditional assumptions about what constitutes luxury, whilst fuelling new modes of premium consumption: rising affluence and the global slowdown. In absolute terms, the number of luxury consumers is rising globally – increasingly too in the emerging super-economies of Asia and Latin America. As luxury becomes ever more accessible, what can it really mean? On the other hand, the global economic crisis has triggered a re-evaluation of the display of wealth, especially in the Western world. Both forces are moving definitions of luxury away from traditional conspicuous drivers of status and prestige, and towards new narratives, codes and signifiers.
So how can the luxury brands of tomorrow speak to premium consumers in meaningful and culturally relevant ways? As part of our on-going investigation into the luxury sector, we have identified three key pillars that any brand claiming luxury status should build itself around. These are:
Quality – luxury products represent the pinnacle in their category and speak of their consumers’ taste and discernment;
Exclusivity – luxury products as markers of (supposed) personal superiority, given that they are affordable only to a limited number of affluent individuals; and
Timelessness – luxury products tell stories of enduring values and are seen to transcend the span of our own lifetime.
And while these underlying pillars remain unchanged, their articulations (i.e. codes and signifiers) fundamentally evolve with time. For example, we are seeing quality signifiers moving beyond references to superior materials and craftsmanship to embody more intangible notions of a brand’s mythology and vision for a better world. This has created a surge in immersive luxury experiences with consumers ‘indulging’ in journeys of personal growth, characterised by an exhilarating mix of (increasingly VR-fuelled) education, entertainment and hedonism.
Exclusivity is now increasingly signified by ‘inner-directed’ values of fulfilment and personal ideals success, and less by notions of status – with luxury products and services helping you to become ‘your best self’, but not necessarily ‘better than others’.
Finally, timelessness is increasingly centred less on escapism and nostalgia for a romanticised past – a tried-and-tested narrative of so many luxury legacy brands – and more about social engagement, ethics and a promise for a better future.
The rules of contemporary luxury are being re-written by ‘outsider’ brands like Apple, Tesla and Virgin Galactic, all of which employ non-traditional, at times counterintuitive luxury codes and narratives. The future of luxury is increasingly immaterial, understated and purposeful. It is only by keeping abreast of social and cultural change that brands can connect more meaningfully with premium consumers across markets.
As festivities approach, it will be fascinating to see which brands succeed in elevating the ritual dimension of Yuletide into a luxury space through timeless or emergent luxury values.
Andrea Basunti is a semiotics consultant at insights consultancy Simpson Carpenter