Luxury products and brands are crafted for consumers. They are designed to be perfect, resemble an indulgence, and represent performance and status. This approach to a luxury offering delights customers and enables exceptional willingness to pay. But what implications does this luxury-driven hyperbolism have for applicants, employees and managers in the luxury domain? We follow this question by transferring what is known about consumer behavior and derive propositions for the impact of luxury brands on their employees. We find that organizations with prestigious images attract a workforce with psychological desires akin to luxury consumers. Furthermore, we argue that managers in leadership positions are not only exposed to a challenging environment for decision making but can also easily be influenced by the characteristics of luxury brands imprinting on their decision making behavior. The contribution highlights an often overlooked aspect of managing a luxury brand: the unintentional but unavoidable impact of luxury image on the brand's own employees.
A luxury good must be rare and desirable. Ideally, it should be close to unobtainable. And yet, the luxury market grows faster than most others, suggesting an ever increasing accessibility to an ever growing populace. A luxury good must be extreme among the other offerings in its category. And yet, there is something inherently relative about luxury goods, driving the definition of luxury away from the offering itself and toward a consumer's situative perspective. Although a luxury good is meant to be uncompromisingly superfluous in terms of effort and materials invested beyond any standard of responsibility, luxury and responsible managerial and consumer behavior is becoming a more and more viable combination, creating eco-conscious fashion and hybrid high-performance sports cars.
Trying to arrive at optimal decisions, firms increasingly value the opinion of decision teams rather than relying on a single person. A quasi-experimental study based on a market entry game, however, indicates that strategic marketing decisions based on dyads can be even more biased. More concretely, by combining regulatory focus theory and literature on social influence, the authors show that individuals having a high promotion focus tend to take abnormal risks and that this tendency is largely amplified if strategic marketing decisions are made jointly with a similar counterpart. Implications for group compositions and effective social decision making are derived.
Luxury brands position themselves on creating offers created through unique savoir-faire. This positioning is commonly supported by substantial brand heritage. However, the ubiquity of heritage as a guiding compass to developing luxury brands leads to a new paradox: how does the notoriously heritage-conscious luxury industry deal with planning ahead? After all, today's luxury industry is not only an ever changing, ever more competitive environment - it is driven by consumer behaviour following the slightest changes in values and consumer culture. A lack of strategic foresight in such a volatile market might leave prestigious brands stranded missing critical turns of the market. In this study, we explored luxury executives' perceptions on strategic foresight. We identified five central factors that determine the degree of managerial engagement in strategic foresight. Moreover, we found three distinct perspectives based on different business sizes and ownership structures. Finally, we integrated our findings and outline a pragmatic research agenda.
Der Luxusmarkt ist im Aufwind. Aber gerade dort finden sich auch viele Turbulenzen, Luftlöcher und andere Unwägbarkeiten. Über die Herausforderungen bei der weltweiten Entwicklung einer Luxus marke sprechen Inga Hofmann, Marketingleiterin bei Louis Vuitton in Deutschland, und Sebastian Huber, Leiter des weltweit grössten Concept Store von Montblanc in Beijing.
Luxusmarken sind auf Wachstumskurs. Selbst Krisenjahre haben im Luxussegment vergleichsweise kleinen Eindruck hinterlassen. Diese kontinuierliche Expansion bedeutet für viele Luxusmarken die Entwicklung in den Grenzbereich zwischen Luxus- und Massenmarkt. Eine von vielen Herausforderungen hierbei ist, die etablierten und erfahrenen Kunden der Marke zu binden und gleichzeitig mit einem offensiv-prestigereichen Image nicht unbeabsichtigt aufstrebende, jüngere Kundenschichten abzuschrecken. Hier entscheidet das Verhalten des Einzelhändlers über Wohl und Wehe!
Luxusmarken schillern nicht nur in Boutiquen, die hinter den Marken stehenden Konzerne sind auch an der Börse interessante Marktteilnehmer: Starke Wertentwicklung und spannende Übernahmeprozesse sind in der Luxusbranche nicht unüblich. Im Interview kommentiert Stefanie Scholtysik, Analystin im Wealth Management Research der UBS, die aktuellen Bewegungen im Markt und gibt Einblicke in die Einschätzung von Luxusmarkenwerten.
