The Luxury Strategy

Kapferer and Bastien argue that luxury is a distinct business category with its own operating rules, and that applying standard marketing practice to a luxury brand destroys it. They set out what they call the anti-laws of marketing: do not respond to rising demand by increasing supply, do not position against competitors, do not let customers dictate the product, raise prices over time rather than discounting, and make the purchase somewhat difficult.

The underlying theory distinguishes three categories that are frequently confused. Premium products compete on a price-to-quality ratio and can be benchmarked. Fashion sells novelty and is inherently short-cycle. Luxury sells social stratification and identity, is anchored in a specific heritage and place, and cannot be benchmarked because it does not compete on a comparable dimension. From this the authors derive concrete operating rules for pricing, distribution control, communication, brand extension, licensing and counterfeiting response.

The book is written for practitioners and draws on the authors' work with European houses, on Kapferer's academic brand research, and on case material from LVMH, Hermes, Cartier and the German car makers. It is the standard practitioner text on the subject. Its limits are real: the framework is largely deduced from European heritage houses and fits poorly with brands built recently, with Asian luxury consumption patterns, and with the shift to e-commerce and direct digital relationships that the 2008 text treats as a threat rather than a channel. The prescription against listening to customers also sits awkwardly with the amount of consumer research the same houses actually run.