The 7 Principles for Designing a Luxury Experience
Grigorian, V. and Peterson, F.E. (2014). Designing luxury experience. European School of Management and Technology working paper (ISSN 1866-3494).
Highlights:
The authors display the seven principles of luxury branding in contrast to traditional mass branding. They identify these principles through an interview process with 50+ subject matter experts. With this qualitative interview approach, the authors identify ideas through interviewees' actual experiences or anecdotes. It's difficult to generalize their results, but the principles serve as ideas for businesses and future research.
1. Brand beliefs vs. values – Luxury brands promote their beliefs (i.e., philosophy) to customers. A set of beliefs is more narrowly focused than values. Beliefs enable customers to connect at a deeper level and therefore lead to higher loyalty. Luxury brands target specific audiences (i.e., they are not for everyone). Luxury brands do not develop their products for mass audiences. For example, Ferrari believes in high performance and elects to invest heavily in Formula 1 (limited traditional advertisement).
2. Visual icons vs. a logo – Luxury brands incorporate numerous visible icons to represent the brand that includes symbols, logos, colors, patterns, images, and concepts. The breadth of visual icons can be a proxy for brand strength. For example, Chanel uses the colors black and white, intertwined c's, the number five, pearls, camellias, etc.
3. Rituals vs. a product – Luxury brands offer unique services (i.e., rituals) and includes attentive salespeople and prompt customer service. An authentic luxury experience will go beyond the traditional buying experience and seeks to exceed customer expectations.
4. Temple (i.e., holy place) vs. a point-of-sale – Luxury brands focus on selling and seek to innovate at the point of purchase. There has been a move from traditional brick-and-mortar to design controlled spaces to create brand experiences and reinforce brand beliefs, including events, exhibitions, and collaborations – think religious sites.
5. Pull select customers vs. market segmentation – Luxury brands pull customers toward their brand and allow customers to become a member of their exclusive club. Contrast this approach to traditional market segmentation and pushing products toward segments. Luxury brands use pricing or select distribution to segment customers naturally. Barriers may also include initiation rituals.
6. Brand legends vs. communicating value – Luxury brands don't push their products at customers in the market. Luxury focuses on an in-direct sell through the communication of the legends and myths associated with the brand. Myth-telling incorporates some mystery and includes a connection with art. Examples include Rolls-Royce and Chanel.
7. A way of life vs. a category – Luxury offers the ultimate intangible, a way-of-life or living. Luxury brands may offer horizontal brand extensions to capture this perspective. For example, Georgio Armani offers products beyond fashion that includes the home, hotels, clubs, and restaurants.
Premium and life-style brands can and do leverage luxury brand practices and techniques.
Overview:
The study differentiates luxury branding from other types of brands in consumer goods. Authors highlight a qualitative method, grounded theory, to develop a framework for customer experiences. The author's analysis identifies seven principles of a luxury experience. The discussion section breaks down each of the seven principles of a luxury experience. Combined with the conclusion, the authors address their research question and argue the differences along with each principle between mass brands versus luxury brands. Their findings, therefore, support the aims of the study.
The overall impact of the article is positive, the authors identify seven areas for additional future research. Executive, senior managers, and designers from a set of known luxury brands were identified for interviews. The interview process and guide solicits responses to the variables (e.g., what is a luxury brand). This study used grounded theory and included a multi-step process of open coding, axial coding, and selective coding. I believe this study could be replicated with other brands or different industries. The seven principles of a luxury experience included in the table are easy-to-understand and self-explanatory. The results adequately contrast traditional perspectives in branding with luxury.
