fact, the economic logics are not identical for true luxury brands and those of intermediate luxury. As its name indicates, intermediate—or accessible—luxury is defined precisely by its affordable price.
In addition to private sales, luxury brands are often interested in developing more affordable collections or products, capitalizing on their notoriety. It is an obviously perilous exercise because of the risk of disrepute. However, some brands have been very successful at it. For the past 10 years, the Ferrari brand has been developing license agreements for all kinds of derivative products in areas that are carefully kept away from its core business: watches, clothes, perfumes, computer equipment, entertainment parks in the Persian Gulf and China, and so on. Ferrari manages the unusual feat of flooding the market with caps or keychains bearing its name and color without altering its true luxury image.
More significant, perhaps, is the current trend that sees middle-market brands, born in general on the left side of the semiotic square of consumption values, developing to the right side, using the codes of behavior of traditional luxury brands in terms of communication, creation, and coherence in the management of brand identity (re)oriented toward luxury. It is a typical movement of mid-range leather-goods brands such as Furla, Longchamp, Coach, Lancel, and so on. Lew Frankfurt, former CEO of the American brand Coach, used to define his brand as “a democratized luxury brand.”18
Certainly, today, to remain competitive, all brands must excel on all four vertices of the square of consumption values. But intermediate luxury is distinguished from true luxury by its presence on the economic vertex, that is, how it positions itself within the logic of interest. Where the real luxury is not afraid of its relative expensiveness, intermediary luxury seeks minimum cost and affordable prices.
True Luxury, Intermediate Luxury
Historical and current definitions of luxury have been classified according to their receptive and productive dimensions; this has also been applied to the most common representations of consumers on luxury. Finally, some analytical instruments have been introduced.
We have seen that mass brands have learned to manage their operations by adopting the rules of traditional luxury: they seek to be present on the four vertices of the semiotic square of consumption values.
Therefore, what may differentiate a true luxury brand, in the sense that was intended 50 years ago, from a new entrant with a proper strategic understanding of the luxury industry and the talent to run an intermediate luxury positioning? One could mention longevity (the tradition, the legacy), but these criteria do not appear to have been taken into account, at least consciously, by the consumers interviewed for the study of the three scales. Are there other differentiating factors? How to distinguish, for example, Hermès from Bottega Veneta or Fendi?
We can invoke what Jean-Marie Floch calls “the refusal of an overall economic hegemony,”19 a brand attitude focusing on other values than the pure logic of profit. In other words, where intermediate luxury is seeking affordability, true luxury is going to position itself not as unaffordable but as foreign to the issue: the left side of the consumption square seems deserted. The stakes are elsewhere.
Very high luxury brands cultivate this type of signal to their consumers when they guarantee their products for life (as Bally was still doing in 2000 for the men's shoe model Scribe that it was repairing when sent back to headquarters), or even when they try to suggest that there is no preferential treatment—that all their customers receive the same (exceptional) attention to service, regardless of their volume of purchases. Some very selective brands can even promote sales models based on cooptation, where purchasing power seem irrelevant, in appearance, at least. This is a way of saying “our demand for quality puts us above mercantile considerations.” This confirms the differentiating role of the critical/economy vertex of the consumption square for true luxury brands (Figure 1.5).
In strict business logic, it is an irrational behavior and in fact it will naturally find its limits. But it is interesting to see that the brand claims it as a posture, that it makes it one of the keys of its identity. This is a major point of differentiation between true luxury and intermediate luxury: the latter cannot afford indifference, or even a hint of indifference, to economic imperatives. One can see also, in this somehow unnatural posture of a true luxury brand, a deviation that brings us back to the etymological sources of the word luxury. Luxury is an excess, a gap, a discontinuity, an eccentricity. It involves a shift from a norm, from a position retained as normal.
Eccentric Luxury
Let's position luxury as a differential with respect to a standard. Can the conditions of this eccentricity be specified? What norms or standards will real luxury brands break from?
For Jean-Marie Floch, the foil is the natural mercantile attitude seeking the optimization of profits in the short term. In fact, anything that is driven by logics of mass markets should remain outside of the realm of luxury: Is the consumer not seeking there, precisely, signs of distinction?
A definition from Jean-Louis Dumas-Hermès (late chairman of Hermès), reported by Lallement, goes in the same direction: “luxury brand is one that manages to meet three conditions: designing beautiful objects; choosing the consumer as the best vector of communication; and finally, deciding freely.”20 What a great formula! Beauty; clients as heralds of the brand; and, finally, freedom, where we meet again with the refusal of the overall economic logics.
Designing beautiful objects is not the exclusive domain of luxury anymore (think of the design of Ikea, Conran, etc.), and the concept of beauty is subjective. Choosing its consumer as a main vector of communication is already a most sought-after strategy, including for brands that aspire to lifestyle status. But it applies in areas other than luxury, for example, in the activation of social networks on the Internet.
We are left with the third part of the Dumas-Hermès statement: freedom. This independence from constraints, standards, and habits is the prerogative of a luxury that is defined by something extraordinary, a meaningful and relevant differential gap. The luxury product distinguishes us from others; it is a sign of being exceptional and freed (with respect to specific norms). Similarly, it should be distributed and promoted in an outstanding manner reflecting somehow this freedom.
Deviation from Norms. Such would be the essence of luxury, the basis for most of the definitions we have seen, for both the productive and perceptual types.
Luxury is not only the denial of mass mercantilism, but also the refusal of certain norms, within the meaning of a convention accepted by the greatest number, a positioning reflecting the distinctive character of luxury as highlighted by sociologists. The antithesis of a standard, luxury will be rare, elitist, expensive, beautiful, original, surprising, superfluous, refined, creative, inaccessible, representative of authority, and so on. Everything will depend on the chosen norms and on the type of perceived deviation.
If one accepts this definition as the “mother” of all the others, the implications are many. Each brand will have to set its own luxury, that is, the way to be competitive as a luxury brand, specifying both the norms it intends to depart from and the differentials on which this gap will rely.
In fact, most major luxury brands carefully cultivate their originality (i.e. their differentials), which they often develop in several directions at a time: a way for them to express luxury, but also to affirm the richness of their identity. This ability to mark its difference may characterize a luxury brand only if it is accompanied by a positioning on the right side of the semiotic square of consumption values: playing on the logics of desire and pleasure, respectively activating myths and dreams as well as fun and aesthetics.
