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The Specificity of Luxury Management: Turning Marketing Upside Down

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Advances in Luxury Brand Management

Part of the book series: Journal of Brand Management: Advanced Collections ((JBMAC))

Abstract

Today luxury is everywhere. Everybody wants his products to be luxury. The concept of luxury is attractive and fashionable. There are luxury columns in all magazines and journals. There are TV shows on the business of luxury and on luxury products and services. Even mass-consumption brands name many of their models ‘Deluxe’ or qualify their experience as luxurious. New words have been recently invented and promoted that add to the complexity: masstige, opuluxe, premium, ultra-premium, trading up, hyper-luxury, real or true luxury, and so on. There is a confusion today about what really makes a luxury product, a luxury brand or a luxury company. Managing implies clear concepts and, beyond these concepts, clear business approaches and pragmatic rules. The aim of this chapter is to unveil the specificity of management of luxury brands. Going back to fundamentals, one needs to distinguish it strongly from both fashion and premium or ‘trading up’. From this starting point, it sets out some of the counter-intuitive rules for successfully marketing luxury goods and services.

This chapter was Reprinted from Kapferer, J. and Bastien, V. (2009) “The Specificity of Luxury Management: Turning Marketing Upside Down”, Journal of Brand Management, 16, pp. 311–22. With kind permission from the Journal of Brand Management. All rights reserved.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Inseec Business School, Paris, France

    Jean-Noël Kapferer & Vincent Bastien

Authors
  1. Jean-Noël Kapferer
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  2. Vincent Bastien
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jean-Noël Kapferer .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Inseec Business School, Paris, France

    Jean-Noël Kapferer

  2. Centre of Competence for Brand Management, University of St. Gallen, St. Gallen, Switzerland

    Joachim Kernstock

  3. Henkel Center for Consumer Goods, WHU-Otto Beisheim School of Management, Düsseldorf, Germany

    Tim Oliver Brexendorf

  4. School of Management and Marketing, University of Wollongong, Wollongong, New South Wales, Australia

    Shaun M. Powell

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Kapferer, JN., Bastien, V. (2017). The Specificity of Luxury Management: Turning Marketing Upside Down. In: Kapferer, JN., Kernstock, J., Brexendorf, T., Powell, S. (eds) Advances in Luxury Brand Management. Journal of Brand Management: Advanced Collections. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51127-6_5

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