Smart Marketing Tactics That Every Luxury Brand Uses
You can learn a lot from luxury brands when looking to brand your business. These are brands that have established themselves above many others, gathering a loyal community of fans as a result.
They are some of the strongest brands around, setting an example for aspirational marketers everywhere.
These brands are often old or well-established through exceptional circumstances, so marketers shouldn’t expect to emulate their success.
That said, understanding luxury branding can put entrepreneurs on the right path to creating a brand that stands out and has great potential in the future.
Luxury Brands Are Strong
To start, luxury brands ace all of the typical branding concerns that other brands wrestle with.
This means they’ve created a memorable, recognizable brand using certain symbols, colors, fonts, and personalities, and they deploy them consistently across their marketing channels.
They also tend to have unique methods or brand narratives that set them apart from industry contemporaries.
In the age of online search, strong brand identities have become necessary to rank highly in results pages and gather traffic.
Fortunately, it’s become easier than ever for entrepreneurs to coordinate their brands, and many tools exist to help you do exactly that.
Certain online businesses don’t just rely on their site branding but the branding of products or services hosted on their website. The best example of this is found in iGaming, where sites display a lot of third-party games and experiences that each have their own brand.
That’s how services like the Lightning Roulette table game work, a stream where players play the game with uniformed hosts in real-time on a set that also adheres to a classy, gold-and-black art deco aesthetic.
Fans are familiar with the brand, while fans of the host site are familiar with its branding, and both run concurrently with one another for mutual benefit. On the internet, every stream, game, or influencer can have a brand attached to them.
This dynamic has made strong brands more important than ever, helping them stand out from the crowd on results pages. Ultimately, this has the positive effect of making entrepreneurs more conscious of branding and its power.
It also means there’s a treasure trove of information available, like the Personal Branding section of our site, to help them nail branding.
Like with most things in business, it’s a great idea to step back and watch what the best in the industry are doing, and then emulate that as much as possible.
If you do that with luxury brands, you’ll quickly notice that they have a lot more going on than smart brand management.
Scarcity is a Strategy
That brings us to the next feature that a lot of luxury brands rely on – scarcity. Supply and demand are fundamental forces in every market, subtly dictating what every product is worth.
It does this for brands too, which is why luxury brands try to keep their product as scarce as possible. Dive deeper into supply and demand with the IMF.
If there’s a lot of demand but not much supply, the business can justify higher pricing and the brand’s products can also become a status symbol.
That, in turn, fosters positive social sentiment around the brand and makes it even more desirable, causing a beneficial feedback loop.
This is no happy accident, it’s a strategy used to great effect by the world’s leading luxury brands. This often includes manufacturing a limited amount of product, organizing private events or providing attentive, bespoke services to a small clientele of high-paying customers.
There have even been documented cases where luxury fashion brands have burned products that they didn’t sell, to make the products that did sell even rarer.
They can do this because, by their calculations, it’s better to uphold an exclusive luxury brand than shift unsold products for less than their desired price point.
Thanks to the internet, business is a lot more transparent today. At the same time, authenticity and relatability have become very popular in marketing.
This is because any brand, especially small ones, can benefit from them. However, it can be tough for luxury brands to walk this tightrope between exclusivity and relatability, something that Forbes has analyzed in the past.
That balance is possible, and scarcity is something that can work for any brand if you’ve found a consistent audience for your product.
Marketing Tactics Luxury Brands Use: Smart & Selective Influencer Branding
Before influencer branding was a thing, the world’s luxury car and fashion brands were ahead of the curve by using celebrities to market their products.
This spread to every corner of marketing in the years that followed, and now, after social media, we have influencer marketing. Luxury brands have taken to influencer marketing like ducks to water, but not every influencer partnership is equal.
The trick with influencer marketing is that it has to make sense. That means influencers must fit the brand personality and any other stated ethos or mission the brand promotes.
If a partnership feels cynical and forced, it won’t succeed. Just like with their products, luxury brands keep influencer partnerships scarce by selecting a few very good candidates.
Typically, those are ones with large audiences in the right demographics, but who also authentically engage with their products before the deal came along.
Exercising the same judgment can pay dividends for up-and-coming brands that are just getting into influencer marketing. When done right, influencers don’t just project your brand out there; they also lend it credibility.
Social media also comes with a lot of special marketing metrics, which are explained here at Internet Vibes.
By building a strong brand and following these two strategies, every brand can benefit from the same tactics that brought luxury brands to the top.
