Janus Thinking

This is the first in a series of guest blog posts from luxury brand marketers and owners, in which Jack Yan talks about his ideas of accessible luxury.

Luxury can no longer be defined along the same lines as we grew up with, or whatever we learned at business school. Before the Rolls-Royce motor car brand fell into BMW hands, annual sales had dwindled: Bentley, once the poor brother of Rolls-Royce, was much more PC and less ostentatious. Even today, HM the Queen’s official car is a hand-made Bentley, an unforeseeable event at the time of her Silver Jubilee.

But in the travel market, I have noticed an opening up at the very top end. To date I still have not heard of a six-star hotel, but I have heard of seven-star ones.

So is this just the changing of the guard?

It can’t be that simple. Recessionary environments do cause a rejection of some luxury brands, but others preserve their niche, comfortably. Yet others extend downward in order to keep sales up.

But at the other end, what were everyday brands have acquired an air of luxury themselves. Levi’s was made for gold prospecting, not posing, at least not initially. Volkswagen was the People’s Car of the Third Reich, not the archetypal “quality” European automobile by which everyone, even Toyota, judges its small hatchbacks.

We have Hennes & Mauritz selling clothes in collaboration with Stella McCartney, then Viktor and Rolf, and now Madonna, just to make the old segments irrelevant, or at best, muddled.

Other forces at work have included the democratization of experiences: the James Bond lifestyle, once the stuff of fantasy, is no longer out of reach. Jet travel itself, indulged by millionaires once upon a time, can cost as little as £1 through some of Britain’s cheapest airlines.

It was in this world that Lucire branched into print in 2004, after seven years, having secured by the end of 2003 the position of the world’s leading online-only fashion magazine. The first problem was: if segmentation as we knew it was dead, then where on earth would this magazine fit?

And the second problem: even if we figured it out, and even if the customer knew, would the channels understand?

One reason I always felt at home in Scandinavia is the whole idea that luxury, or at least design excellence, should be available to all. It is a familiar principle to anyone who had studied the history of the Bauhaus Design School in Weimar; fortunately for the Swedes, they managed to keep those principles going in a fairly uninterrupted fashion through World War II.

Lucire was born in 1997, at a time when the notion of democratization was stronger than that of snobbery. It did not matter if a web site was made by a one-man band or if it were created under the auspices of Condé Nast; anyone, with the smoke-and-mirrors knowledge provided by design and typography, could play the luxury game. And so we did, with one eye remaining on the way consumers were changing.

And they were, rapidly. Luxury was about accessibility, not exclusivity. Premium is the new mainstream. Those words remained with us as 2003 became 2004, and Lucire’s future as a multi-media (the hyphen is intentional) property unfolded.

I still believe this. Quality can be had for $9.95 or $99.50, and in the fashion business, these sorts of differences are not unrealistic. We decided that Lucire’s price had to undercut some of the existing magazines, even though we were printing on a larger format page, based on the idea that consumers were moving away from the old divisions. We had to bring some of the internet principles into print.

We priced Lucire above the popular Australian-owned competitor, Fashion Quarterly, not to be confused with the same magazine from Canada. We would tread the middle of the road, for our own readers had told us that that was where their incomes lay. But we would spoil them with premium products, which many would buy, if some sales’ improvement figures of some of our clients are to be believed.

When the United States’ richest man, William Gates III, drove a Lexus, this strategy did not seem to be foolhardy. Rich people could buy us because rich people, as Mr Gates showed, like good value, too. Everyday people could buy us because we weren’t ripping them off.

Yet some channels in New Zealand, our first market, were still stuck in the marketing school world of the 1950s. Rich and poor. Premium and poverty. Hardly reflective of a nation that prides itself on being nationally middle-class, where tipping is unheard of and considered the province of less civilized nations that still looked at the world through master-and-servant eyes.

Lucire found itself in the nicest suburbs like Merivale, Christchurch, where it sold out in its first week; but equally, it would sell out in the student bookstores nationally. But we were not finding ourselves in the middle among retailers, where our readers were, and we were failing to crack the sales’ figures of our major competitors. That much I admit, publicly. Those middle-of-the-road retailers who stuck with us find we sell reasonably well and we were all rewarded.

My idea of luxury is probably in line with the consumers’. It is about accessibility, design excellence, and quality, but it is not about exclusivity. Everyone deserves to be spoiled from time to time. A luxury brand, and I do count Lucire as one, need not be so narrowly focused that only the rich buy into its world. Nor does it need to have every channel member indulging at the top end of the income spectrum. Luxury, ultimately, is a state of being, and that can be done at a variety of prices.

But try telling that to retailers, who have not branched out from their bimodal reckoning of the market-place.

The ideas of accessible luxury is not totally foreign in other regions, otherwise H&M would not even dare try its M by Madonna line. However, they do own their own stores, which should perhaps be our next move…

This article continues our series of guest blog posts from luxury brand marketers and owners. Stanley Moss is the founder of Diganzi, the international brand consultancy.

In our semiotic society, luxury brands deliver the ultimate sense of individuality and personal identity as emulated in products and services we choose.

Historically the luxury category survived by providing products which could not be had by everyone. These were distinguished by their scarcity, rarity, design excellence, classicism and cost. Luxury was the province of the rich, or a unique occasion for those who normally could not afford it. For years luxury was also the territory of those who could distinguish it. In times of recession, luxury brands pursued textbook strategies to survive: narrowing licensing, consolidating retail and messaging, reissuing heritage designs, limiting production, brand extensions.

Mass communications, marketing, media and the internet transformed the category. The earliest phenomenon was the segmentation of luxury into distinct levels spanning high-end house brands to premium luxury, with multiple gradations in between. Hijacked brands such as Hummer also entered the luxury marketplace, adopted by constituencies never imagined or solicited by their creators. More recently the category realized that consumers wanted affordable luxury, opening the market to new products like premium chocolates and coffee, that is, commodities with luxury attributes, but at the accessible price point.

Internet-based supply chain solutions enabled mass customization later in the supply side process – apparel and footwear retailers like Lands End, Converse and Brooks Brothers now offer affordable product tailored to customers unique specifications of measure and material, formerly the exclusive domain of luxury. With luxury so widely available to the mass market, demand has increased for low-tier luxury, evidenced by the $500 billion of counterfeit luxury goods trafficked yearly. The high end now demands what IHT Style Editor Suzy Menkes recently characterized as ‘extreme luxury’, aspirational products at the tipping point of price, production and quality.

A good deal of inventiveness has been observed in the creation of brand extensions in the category, which currently is experiencing a thriving market. A fine example is Bulgari, who have applied their mark to fragrance and eyewear (the first classic brand extensions of couture), a resort, a car, and a commissioned romance novel featuring a string of Bulgari pearls as the main character.

The luxury category exhibits hybrid behavior, in that their innate constraints – the expression of heritage values- cannot be easily surrendered without devaluing or transforming brand perception. Witness Gucci and Saint Laurent, once languishing, now revived, but not at the expense of their heritage. Luxury is Darwinian. The original attributes must remain, but in peaceful coexistence with all-important brand innovation.

You may also be interested in reading Jack Yan’s thoughts about luxury.

As more and more people consume luxury goods and become interested in appreciating the finer things in life, the idea of connoisseurship will play a larger role in peoples’ hearts and minds. Indeed if becoming a connoisseur of art or “matters of taste” (such as wine, fine jewelry or even cigars) is something that more people want to do, an opportunity arises for those who own luxury brands and provide luxury goods.

This first post in our series will provide a definition of connoisseurship; the next will elaborate on what connoisseurs look for, the third will discuss connoisseurship’s split from academia, and the final post will discuss connoisseurship with an eye towards luxury.

To begin, we should define our terms. According to the Oxford Companion to Art (Oxford University Press 1970), a connoisseur is

“one who is more thoroughly equipped with sound aesthetic judgment than is an amateur. The connoisseur contributes insights which deepen, enlarge and advance aesthetic judgments which lie outside the purview of the expert.”

Adds Wikipedia,

“judgment informed by intuition is essential, but it must be grounded in a thorough understanding of the work itself.”

Connoisseurship, then, according to the OED, is

“the role or part of the connoisseur, critical acquaintance with works of art or matters of taste.”

Elliott Eisner, a Stanford professor who specializes in arts education, says that connoisseurship is

“the art of appreciation… (it) is a private act; it consists of recognizing and appreciating the qualities of a particular.”

Connoisseurship is about taking the time to fully appreciate your subject. A true appreciation requires not just research and analysis, but also introspection.

The next post in this series will discuss the four elements of connoisseurship: attribution, authenticity, condition and quality.

Connoisseurship, the thorough appreciation and knowledge of art or “matters of taste,” has traditionally only been discussed as a scholarly pastime. A connoisseur has put in his time and studied a great deal in order to understand his field and the players in it. He also knows exactly what to look for when he sees something new.

Not unlike the way buyers of diamonds consult the 4Cs before making a purchase (we’ve mentioned them on Janus Thinking before here), connoisseurs engage with four aspects of an item in order to fully comprehend it. These aspects are attribution, authenticity, condition, and quality.

Attribution: What is it? Who is the author?
The connoisseur attributes authorship.

Authenticity: Was it actually made by whom it’s attributed to? Is it really what it says it is?
The connoisseur validates authenticity.

Condition: Is it like new? Is it well worn? Has it aged gracefully or poorly?
The connoisseur appraises condition.

Quality: Is it flawless? Is it particularly intricate or nuanced?
The connoisseur evaluates quality.

Wikipedia reminds us that the connoisseur engages with these aspects “on the basis of empirical evidence, refinement of perception about technique and form, and a disciplined method of analysis.” The connoisseur must spend a great deal of time to develop these skills. Indeed a true connoisseur will have entirely immersed himself in what he wants to learn to appreciate.

That was certainly the case for William Ivins Jr, an accomplished curator at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art from 1916 - 1946. Unlike most curators, he had no advanced degrees, had taught himself art history, and had worked for years as a lawyer and stockbroker. But his interest in art led him to review tens of thousands of prints. Varying a great deal in authorship, authenticity, condition and quality, the prints allowed Ivins’ to develop an eye for the phony and the sublime. As curator of the Met he amassed “one of the world’s most encyclopedic repositories of printed images.”

Ivins did it without an MFA or DPhil in Art History; his story demonstrates that with time and passion anyone can become a connoisseur. Indeed, the next post in this series will discuss the decline of taught connoisseurship.