What sets luxury brands apart from the rest? If I want to give the impression my design brand has a luxury, very good quality service then I have to do some research into what people consider to be luxury brands and what sets them, apart from the crowd. In 2012 the US the luxury fashion market was estimated to be a value of $274 Billion with predictions of the value reaching $290 Billion by 2015. This would obviously prove that it can be very profitable to advertise your business as an outstanding service with a certain luxurious feel to it. Obviously, to come across as a luxurious brand you must offer an extremely good service, but a lot comes down to the branding and advertising, and this is something worthwhile knowing for my self-promotion.
Something that should be noted here is the work Sigmund Freud did when he completely changed the way we consume, he was the one who had the idea to promote things so that the customer had an emotional connection to the product. Due to Freud, we now connect certain emotions to products, so power would come with expensive cars and watches, nice clothes would make someone more attractive, drinking expensive champagne would make someone classy and so on, this is partly how these luxurious brands manage to charge so much for their products, they simply appeal to consumer nature with emotion and psychology.
Chanel – The colour black is relatable to elegance, mystery and prestigiousness and the logo is symbolic of the luxury products they sell
The famous interlocking C’s were originally in chapel which had stained glass windows which featured them. You can see the window here:
Their website is full of attractive, well off people advertising their product in the best possible light, thew website itself is a wonderful experience complete with white space, nice hierarchy and beautiful design. When shopping their products section they keep it really simple and they actually have no models but instead show the product against a white backdrop, this means the entire page is entirely white other than the menu and the products themselves. Even after selling the customer this lifestyle of beauty, extravagance and wealth, the site then sells the product itself rather than an image. It used the image for the basis but then relies on the quality of its products to do the rest, so mixing the quality of the product with a vision of a certain lifestyle is how Chanel brand themselves. You can see the two different screens below;
Burberry is another famous brand given the luxury label – it has a value of $4.1 Billion and is rated 8th most valuable brand in the world. Again their logo;
is in black which has the same connotations as Chanel, these are of elegance, mystery and prestigiousness. The logo, designed in 1901, features an equestrian horse and is one of the most iconic logos in modern fashion. The shield of the rider is a symbol of protection but also the equestrian stands for pride, purity and grandeur, these things give the brand a certain luxurious feel before you have even stepped into their shop or looked at their product. The same can be said for Burberry’s website as Chanels, they feature images of attractive people on the homepage wearing their products but then when you click on the indivual products is ore about the quality of the product than the experience that goes with it and as you can see they have cropped out the models face for this reason.
Rolex is an expensive watch brand which has a market value of $7.9 Billion and is the worlds 5th most valuable company.
Their logo is also in black, which has the same connotations elegance, mystery and prestigiousness. To add to this though their symbol is of a crown which is recognised to be worn by royalty, so again, the logo gives the brand a certain feel of luxury before they have even looked at their products, this is something my logo doesn’t do so would have to make up in other ways. The word ‘Rolex’ is mean’t mean’t to have some french relation to the word exquisite.
The Rolex website is a bit different to the two previous sites, the homepage simply features the product with a small amount of text. Then when you click on the product you get lots of images with more text, there are no models, no impression of a certain lifestyle if you buy their product, simply just shows the quality and detail of their product in all its all glory
Finally, the Bugatti logo depicts the initials of Ettore Bugatti who invented the company in 1909 in the oval which is meant to represent elegance and technology.
The Bugatti website like Rolex amplifies the quality of their product rather than likening them to a certain lifestyle, while their products are things of beauty, even when you click on the different sections of the site, all you see is the car itself. Therefore you don’t need to show a certain lifestyle too become a luxurious brand, just present your product in the best light possible. You can again see their website below:
So, what have I learn? I believe to come across as a luxurious brand, you have to consider who your target audience are and allow them to relate to your product. Everyone wants nice things, and they want to come across well, and just like Freud’s early ideas about connecting emotions and feeling with products, you can very easily make people think in a certain way. By showing respectable, good looking person using the service, then the consumer will almost look up and aspire to be like him. By putting this image in their head of what they could potentially be and look like is enough to drive them to believe that your service/product would do that for them. I need to take full advantage of this psychological manipulation to make my audience perceive my brand in a certain way. I need to focus on being seen as a luxury brand but not forget about still having really good quality products to back up the psychology.
References:
http://www.therichest.com/expensive-lifestyle/fashion/10-most-powerful-luxury-fashion-brands-in-the-world/3/
http://www.iep.utm.edu/freud/
http://fashionista.com/2011/11/the-origin-of-chanels-interlocking-cs-logo-and-six-other-cool-things-we-learned-about-the-history-of-chanel
http://famouslogos.net/rolex-logo/
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