Fashion: Branding and Luxury Brands

This expansion demonstrates how the luxury industry is now run by massive corporations whose focus is only on growth, visibility, brand awareness, advertising, and most importantly, PROFITS! With growth and expansion, has come a decrease in quality and rarity. The luxury garments produced are mostly not handmade but are even outsourced to large factories in places such as China and Turkey. Also, to meet quarterly turnover projections, “designers churn(ed) out increasingly trendy collections of clothes, handbags, and shoes.” (Thomas, Pg. 246) With hundreds of new stores around the globe the surplus of designer labeled merchandise is immense hence, the proliferation of outlet malls.

Luxury brands are an innovative concept both from the perspective of a marketer and the consumer.

From consumer’s perspective, the motivation of their purchasing high-end products is complicated. According to the report of Mintel (Academic.mintel.com, 2013), which showed that the reason why a large number of customs have purchased luxury merchandise in UK. There were 44 percent of female interviewees and 48 percent of male interviewees bought high-end goods due to the good quality. In addition, 31 percent of men and 18 percent of women consider the sophisticated technique

The consumption of luxury goods in China is mounting sharply. Not only those born to elite families, but also many common people are greedy for luxury brands (China, a Booming

Sociocultural: In the recent years, the desire to appear wealthy has attributed to the increased popularity in luxury products. Also, the desire for luxury goods was promoted by effective advertising and TV programming that promoted conspicuous consumption to middle-income consumers. Middle-income consumers also tend to “reward” themselves with luxury items.

The author who inspired the topic of this thesis is Dana Thomas. As a fashion writer, Dana Thomas, has analyzed the changes in luxury fashion business. Thomas has been writing about fashion for the past twenty-five years in various journals such as Newsweek, The New York Times Magazine, New Yorker, Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, Financial Times, and more. Dana Thomas’ two books, Deluxe and Gods and Kings, are the inspiration for this thesis. Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Lustre goes into great detail the secrets of the leading luxury industry brands, namely Prada, Gucci and Burberry, to showcase the “New Luxury” of today and how “luxury lost its luster” by featuring the manufacturing and logistical processes. Thomas exposes that many luxury brands use the same Asian factories that mass-market retailers employ, which raises questions concerning quality and craftsmanship for luxury brands.

Luxury is uniqueness, attitude and ethnicity. Internet is purely a medium of communication for Luxury brands. The industry has been showing less dedication towards integrating complex technologies and its associated interactive and digital tools in marketing and overall commerce strategies. There is also a push to be present on the internet to evolve consumer needs and expectations. The initiation of internet as a universal supply channel provided an unparalleled medium by which to boost brand awareness and recover market share. This proposal provides an outline for exploratory research in sustaining the luxury brands online. The study overlaps research findings on internet marketing and consumer behavior for luxury brands.

Andy Warhol, a pioneer in the visual art movement once said: “Whenever people and civilizations get degenerate and materialistic, they always point at the outward beauty and riches and say that if what they were doing was bad, they wouldn’t being doing so well, being so rich and beautiful” (Warhol, 1975). Throughout history, luxury emerged as early as civilization did. For old Romans, the concept of luxury was a “disruptive power of desire”. They set up the first laws about luxury: “how much could be spent on banquets and adornment” (Ward, 2011). Since the rise of Christianity, luxury stared to changed its meaning to be related to lust and sexuality. Until 17th century, perspectives of

This behavior brings competitive advantages to the European luxury brands. Moreover, customers in different countries have different purchase behaviors. For instance, some countries’ customers are willing to move away from common recognized brand, because they want to purchase more exclusive products. Furthermore, because of the increasing speed of globalization, people are more likely willing to travel between different countries. These travelers will buy luxury good during their trips. In fact, Chinese tourists contributed over one third of sales in Europe. The luxury goods industry should notice to adjust the actual demand between local people and tourists in Europe

Maintenance of the brand image is always the fore most important factor for the luxury brands in order to sustain in the market. is very critical. Therefore, of all the criteria mentioned above, we have determined the brand image is the most important criterion on which we will base our recommendation.

Political: The global luxury goods market can separate into America, Europe, Japan, Asia-Pacific, and rest of countries by region. Overall, the major luxury goods consumption countries have relatively stable political environment in recent years. However, in southern Europe, the

The overall sales of luxury goods in the year 2009 is expected to be more than US$150 billion and Asia contributes 10% to it. The concept of luxury is now not confined to only to Europe and US, the Asian subcontinent contributes majorly to it, with India and China as the newly emerging markets. Professor James Twitchell (2002) comments on the democratization of luxury and the changing consumer psychology These new customers for luxury are younger than clients of the old luxe used to be, they are far more numerous, they make their money far sooner, and they are far more flexible in financing and fickle in choice. They do not

LVMH’s brand portfolio is a catalogue of the finest things money can buy. Arnault said, “A Star brand is timeless, modern, fast growing and highly profitable.”[iii] LVMH has positioned its brands strongly in the luxury segment offering more than 50 different brands under their five core competencies. LVMH has been successful through all of their various brands in their portfolio giving them each their independence and creativity. “LVMH is well known for leaving much operational and marketing freedom to the various brands it owns.”[iv] “LVMH has done an excellent job of brand positioning, says Ben Cavender, senior analyst at China Market Research Group. It has succeeded in securing the particularly enviable position of gaining a following among the top percentage of China’s wealthy. As the financial crisis stretches on, LVMH customers in China still have money to spend.[v] “LVMH’s brand imaging, which relies heavily on pushing its European heritage, is so successful that it has benefited other brands by proxy, says Paul French, one of the founders of Access Asia, a group dedicated to tracking regional consumer and marketing trends. “Everyone hangs on the coattails of Louis Vuitton’s brand imaging in China.”[vi]

With concern to 26 to 45 years old consumers, we believe that a personal shopper service and made ​​to order service might be useful solutions in order to have their loyalty giving them specific services that only luxury brands do. In fact, that way they can get the most out of their luxury buying experience. To finish, we also suggest the creation of events during which the can purchase new collections in advance, generally the day before the collections are officially out in stores.

Luxury product sales boost in the emerging marketing like China, which has extraordinary growth and strong potential consumers for the development of luxury goods in the China market. With gradually lower and lower increase of revenue in the European countries, Louis Vuitton (abridged as LV in the following sections) commits itself to set up more stores in China. However, LV is faced with the problems of declining profits in China, which urges it to adjust its entry strategy into the China market. In this case, this report will focus on distinguishing the factors that influence LV’s development in China and