Abstract
Today, luxury is not only for the elite but also for the elitist part of each of us. The shockvertising stream has helped luxury brands to touch more consumers regarding the new idea of consuming luxury. But before luxury brands realised that they needed to communicate to obtain new consumers, their conception of a luxury product communication was quite “old fashioned”.
Luxury is defined with three criteria: the brand visibility, the symbolic and the quality.
It is of primary importance for a luxury brand to control its image. We have to remember that luxury is the opposite of standardization.
Till the end of the 1980s, the public image of luxury brands was carried only by models of various origins: Western, Asian and African Afro which represents locally and universally all the markets of the Luxury Houses. In fact, the French Houses mostly, stay closed on themselves, denying the existence of the Luxury Houses from the other countries, refusing to take risks, and then continuing to use minimalist communication without imagination.
Their marketing techniques are not the marketing techniques used by mass-marketers, because the luxury trend, according to them, is not to follow the trend but to precede it, to create it, to create fashions. The luxury marketing does not have aims, especially in France, to answer identified expectancies of the consumer but to cause his desire. Moreover, luxury products are seldom the objects of qualitative studies or market researches at the moment.
The marketing of luxury is marketing of proposal, where the initiative is always on the side of the creator, but we can notice the lack of creativity in luxury communication.
Indeed, advertisings are minimalists, and in general, show little imagination. In general, in black and white they always show the product alone or held by a model. This judicious representation of the product shows that this product is the perfection itself. The brand and its product are the message and that's enough. In the majority of the cases, it was enough to point out the existence of the product, without necessarily putting it on scene.
The often high prices does not allow the winningof loyalty of a large clientèle. Formerly fed with "ordinary consumption of exceptional people", luxury lives today with "exceptional consumption of ordinary people".
Then, Luxury Houses need to touch a larger “clientèle”. But, communication strategies used till now don't allow this target extension. A GREAT CHANGE IS NEEDED.
