experience matters

The marketing premise behind luxury brands used to be mystique. If you want the brand to be aspirational then create an aura that is, in fact, difficult to obtain. Tag lines like ‘The Crowning Achievement”, “Unlike Any Other” and of course “Don’t Dream It, Drive It” all ooze with the idea that ‘this brand is not for everyone’. Well, that decision is not up to the marketer anymore. If it used to be mystique, today it is transparency.

Last week I spoke at a breakfast put together by Milton Pedraza and his Luxury Institute. I expected a novice audience and while a few did fit that bill, most were already down the road of embracing today’s digital luxury consumer.

The point of my discussion was that in order to blend high touch, a key element to luxury, and high tech, a key element of today’s digital consumer, brands have to understand that time is the new luxury. If I’m buying a Jaguar I am spending just as much time learning about the brand and the product as the person who is buying a Chevy. Where I do that learning is, for the most part, based on my time.

If I choose to engage with a luxury brand, regardless of the environment, I expect that experience to be high touch and on my terms. There are ten tenants to a luxury digital experience (you can view the presentation here):

1. Meticulously crafted
2. Superior customer service
3. Personalized
4. Be exclusive
5. Celebrate the product
6. Treat them like part of the club
7. Be sensory
8. Be intelligent
9. Be efficient
10. Be everywhere

That last one is tricky. It’s tough to be everywhere on today’s budgets. I was impressed, however, with some of the attendees who had already invested resources against Twitter and the social sphere in an attempt to understand where “everywhere” was for them.

Luxury brands, more than any other, continue to withdraw from their brand equity banks with re-purposed marketing that still says tradition and heritage. If they want to sell digitally today, they have to embrace time as the new luxury and understand that it is the consumer who wears the watch.