As Britain creeps out of recession Pipeline’s thoughts have been turning to the wonderful world of luxury. Maybe we are being a bit presumptuous, what with all the ‘double-dip’ talk, but what the hell we’re optimists.
The first thing we’ve been trying to agree is what ‘luxury’ actually means. Wiktionary defines luxury as: 1. something desirable, but expensive and 2. something very pleasant but not really needed in life. This has not really helped us close down the debate. After all ‘expensive’ is a relative concept (when you are starting a new business with your own cash most things feel ‘expensive’), as is ‘pleasantness’ (one person’s ‘pleasant’ can very easily be another’s ‘totally grim’) as are ideas of what people feel they ‘need’ or don’t need in life.
It seems we are not alone in struggling with the meaning of luxury. The way in which the luxury world throws out qualifications – we’ve had ‘classic’, ‘mass-tige’, ‘uber’ and ‘ultra’ and now we’ve got ‘recession luxury’ – shows how loose the word’s concept is. There are even reports that LVMH boss Bernard Arnault has started avoiding the term luxury altogether, preferring to talk about ‘quality’ instead.
The reason for all this name juggling is that the meaning of luxury is subjective and relative. As the Harvard Business Review put it recently – ‘All luxury brands are not the same-they can mean different things to different people or even different things to the same people.’ Here at Pipeline we think of luxury as being a bit like beauty. Yes it is subjective and ‘in the eye of the beholder’, but there are lots of cases where pretty much everyone agrees that someone or something is beautiful. Just like beauty, luxury operates on personal and shared, social and cultural levels. There are things that only a few people would consider a luxury and then there are things that are established in culture as shared symbols of luxury. And as with ideas of beauty, the symbolic, shared ideas of luxury change over time.
So where is the shared, symbolic world of luxury turning right now? Significant change has been brewing for some time already. In western markets ideas of luxury have been shifting from a focus on owning expensive things to a greater emphasis on the value of less tangible things such as time, experiences, creativity and ideas.There have always been these kinds of ebbs and flows in ideas of luxury in the past. Periods of relative austerity have invariably followed bouts of excess and vice versa. So perhaps we should be seeing what is happening as just another slightly more austere lull, with full luxury service set to resume some time soon?
The interesting thing for us is that current luxury shifts are set against an exceptional background of stark crises of resource availability and climate change issues. If the recession has been a catalyst for underlying attitudinal change, the resource and climate debates are making paring back your luxury lifestyle socially acceptable and in some cases aspirational. We think this is important because it could mean that excessive, relatively purposeless consumption (the building block for many of our most iconic luxury brands, think luxury cars, luxury houses, holidays etc.) will lose its allure in a lasting way versus just being a short term swing.
So what does all this mean for luxury brands?
It means they may well have to act quite differently to sustain their long term luxury status. The ones that last will develop ever smarter ways to derive symbolic luxury status through increasingly less tangible offerings. They will learn to rely less on the value being in the things they sell and more on the meaning of what they sell. They will need to become more like the curators and artists who turn relatively inexpensive media (paint, clay and canvas) into priceless objects.
So, how might the next generation of luxury brands add meaning to what they sell? Here’s just a few areas we think are worth exploring and are set to grow….
1. Things that help you use less not more
2. Things that can genuinely last a lifetime
3. Things that help you slow down
4. Things that help you enjoy taking responsibility
5. Things that help you connect more strongly with people you care about
6. Things that can be adapted and made better over time
So, if you’ve got ideas on how this will evolve, or think differently about it, please let us know and we’d love to hear from you.