Eluxior Luxury Club Inaugeration Dinner, Paris : Video displayed with the compliments of www.eluxior.com – a worldwide luxury club consisting of influential people in the luxury field. Its all about truth and authenticity, not storytelling.
What is ‘Haute Luxe?’
This is not just another book about branding presented as a pseudo-science. Those days are over. Simple brand ’story-telling’ is over too.
Haute Luxe means High Luxury. Its about products made with Haute Love, passion, integrity and authenticity and services are delivered with genuine kindness and care. Haute Luxe not good French. In correct French it should be ‘Haut Luxe’ which sounds like Oh! Luxe. Grand Luxe is a more common description for high luxury brands but Grand sounds like an old fashioned traditional luxury. Super-Luxury implies something ostentatious, something to show-off – ‘bling bling’ – in bad taste. Haute Luxe combines both tradition and trend and sets the standard for good taste. For branded luxury, the choice is often one of Image versus Income. Luxury brands with the greatest turnover often have the lowest image and that’s where the dangers lie. Haute Luxe are the Haute Couture marques that are not known to all and not accessible to all. The connoisseur will know them, and we are all becoming connoisseurs. The word ‘brand’ does not suit them. Brand implies mass awareness, mass production and mass marketing. Luxury and brand are words that simply don’t fit together. Perhaps the word ‘brand’ is now in need of some serious rebranding.
This book is more about human curiosity, intuition, adventure and surprise. It’s about human relationships, passion, desire, love, trust, betrayal or simply disappointments. It’s about family, kinship, honour and heritage. It’s about simplifying branding, examining brands before they become brands and de-branding brands once they have become brands. It respects and pays tribute to Haute Luxe ‘brands’ that remain discreet, authentic and are generous – always giving more than expected. Most importantly it differentiates between the industrialised and democratised so-called luxury brands driven by business plans and the non-industrialised, hand-crafted, impeccably-made, super-humanised, soulful and often unknown, Haute Luxe ‘griffes’ that are driven by a passion for creation. It is these ‘marques’ that will win favour with the connoisseur-client of our times, most of whom feel ‘luxed out’ by the corporate brands.
I look forward to sharing the European secrets of Haute Luxe ‘branding’ with you, your management or your business school (Luxury MBA remains the fastest growing specialised MBA), as well as to our discovering the best of what the world can offer together. Hopefully this book will inspire you to create an impeccable Haute Luxe ‘brand’ of your own as well as guide you in its development.
For more about me, simply click on my name in the left hand column or here.
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This book outlines the differences between Haute Luxe and the regular luxury brand. It comes at a time when the Western markets are in turmoil, a time when famous global investment banks have folded as a result of what is now being called ‘casino capitalism’, yet it is also a time when record sales of fine art from branded artists are being realised at Sothebys auctioneers. Luxury brands are bound to be hurt as a result of the credit crunch that began in the USA mostly affecting homeowners and small businesses. Obama is now in office, and the era of greed has gone. The US government is buying up bad debt and the British Banks have been partly nationalised and restructured by parliament and other countries are expected to find their own urgent solutions to get their economies moving and luxury brands are bound to suffer, but not all. The Haute Luxe brands are expected to continue to enjoy sustainable sales, as will some ludicrous luxury items and first brands to fail are likely to be the ones that have the least substance.
The book assumes that people are more knowledgeable than ever before with regards to luxury brands and many can now be considered connoisseurs. They are harder to bluff and want to know more. This text outlines what people will want to know in order to build a lasting and loving relationship with brands. We examine these relationship building blocks, the attitudinal building blocks because attitudes drive behaviour (and vice versa). It looks at the relationship from both brand and client points of view to see why people will feel connected to a brand and therefore more likely to speak up for it. This is primarily written for those who are responsible for their brands in some form or another. Essentially it provides guidelines for building coherent brand stories – relationship and love stories with customers. It speaks of experiences that they can share together and serves to guide effective brand communication strategy.
As such, this is not written as a traditional ‘business book’. Instead it aims to provide designers through to entrepreneurs key strategic points to consider when creating or seeking to improve a luxury brand. It is the first book on luxury brands that delves into the subconscious aspects of a brand’s DNA no matter which industry you may be competing in. It aims to assist you, inspire you, and warn you of pitfalls that may lie ahead, should you be someone with a role to play in the destiny of a luxury brand. As such, it is not about the 4Ps of marketing either. Its focus is on everything you need to know and everything you should consider building into a brand before presenting it to the world. It also provides you with guidelines on how to fix deep problems within a brand.
In the meantime you may wish to read a really good book on Luxury Brands (not specifically ‘high luxury’ which is my focus), read The Luxury Strategy (Luxe Oblige is the French version) co-authored by my most respected competitor, J-N Kapferer.