The backbone of any customer experience management is the ability to understand customers’ needs, wants and lifestyles (Schmidt, 2003). In a post Covid era where consumer behaviours have changed forever, luxury brands need to step up to woe consumers back to their brick-and-mortar stores. For example, the Dior historical and global store at the Avenue Montaigne reopened after two years of renovations to offer a unique customer experience. This iconic store now offers not only the full range of products one can buy, but also an art gallery, a café, a 3-Michelin stars restaurant and an exclusive suite at the price of 25,000 Euros per night. The centrepiece of this new store is the huge glass staircase overlooked by a wall of mannequins dressed in various Dior dresses. It is meant to be “instagramable” for those who need to show off their visit to their virtual followers. The key question one may ask is whether all these innovations and investments in building an exceptional flagship store provide a better customer experience?

Although pricing strategies have significant effects on brand performance and have been growth drivers of the luxury industry for decades, there is only little research on luxury pricing strategies. Most academics and managers believe that there is a ‘democratization of luxury’ since the 1980’s. Today, luxury is regarded as accessible for almost anyone. On the other hand, researchers and consumers still consider ‘high prices’ as one of the most important luxury characteristics. To resolve this paradox, this paper analyzes ‘expensiveness’ as a key feature of luxury products: Is luxury expensive or has it really democratized? It outlines the different types of luxury with reference to their ‘expensiveness’. Based on a literature analysis about research on pricing in luxury marketing, the paper presents eight indicators of ‘expensiveness’. After discussing how the Veblen, Snob and Bandwagon effects break the law of demand, analyses of real data follow with some case studies about the price development of luxury products in different countries and product categories. They show that the method of price comparison by Fourastié can provide brand managers a more realistic picture about the ‘expensiveness’ of their products for their target customers. The paper concludes with some major lessons learned.

In response to growing instability and a perceived over-commercialization also of luxury brands, there is a trend among consumers to search for meaning and for experiences that feel genuine. The “humanization” of brands may feed the consumers growing desire for authenticity. This paper combines the brand personality concept and brand anthropomorphization and introduces the notion of personality-driven brand management especially for luxury brands and high-end cultural and creative businesses. After an introduction into the concept of brand personality, and with reference to identitydriven brand management, we explain what personality-driven brand management actually means. When the focal point of brand management shifts to the enlivened brand, the brand personality becomes the main source of inspiration for brand-building and influences all branding decisions. With personality-driven branding, managers may leverage the full potential of brand anthropomorphization. For instance, it can help to turn the brand into a strong character, which can spark the employee’s enthusiasm and thus also the customer’s passion for the brand. As a prerequisite of (internal) brand anthropomorphization, managers need to decide what kind of person they would like their brand to represent. For this purpose, they can consult a framework of brand personality dimensions for some guidance. A central part of this paper is a study about the major dimensions of luxury brand personality. Results suggest that there exist five distinct luxury personality dimensions including tradition, modesty, elitism, eccentricity, and sensuality. They help brand managers to develop distinct brand personalities by encouraging them to decide between contrasting traits. After presenting the major strategies to bring a luxury brand personality alive, the paper discusses the benefits of personality-based brand management and concludes with some major lessons learned.

There has been a global growth of luxury business start-ups, which has accelerated especially since the late 1990s along with the upswing of the global luxury market. Start-ups in the high-end cultural and creative industries reflect the various new types of luxury from green or sustainable luxury and slow luxury to value luxury, and from digital and high-tech luxury to experience luxury. However, there exist only a few studies about luxury brand-building, the related area of luxury marketing success factors (Fionda and Moore, 2008) and the new research domain of luxury entrepreneurship (Fonrouge and Lipovetsky, 2013). Therefore, the objective of this paper is to identify critical success factors of luxury brand-building. In the high-end and generally in the lifestyle segment, the generation of a business model must go hand in hand with brand-building. Even more, setting-up a luxury or lifestyle business is hardly possible without emphasizing on brand-building. Consequently, we suggest combing business model generation with brand-building as this is naturally an interrelated process, especially in the high-end and creative industries. Based on the Business Model Canvass by Osterwalder and Pigneur (2014), we develop the Brand-Building Canvas and then use it as a framework to analyze the success factors of luxury brand-building. As success criteria of luxury marketing depend on a brand’s stage of development, we employ the concept of brand lifecycles to differentiate success factors. Due to its explanatory power for real-life organisational phenomena, our study relies on Grounded Theory, combined with a multiple case study methodology according to Fionda and Moore (2008). We analyzed ten luxury start-ups in different development stages and from various luxury industry segments and countries. The empirical database was obtained from multiple sources including also documentary material such as company presentations, brochures, homepages, and media articles. Moreover, expert interviews were conducted with representatives of the luxury start-ups and other relevant industry experts. Based on a content-analysis of the empirical database, we outline an overview of success factors of luxury brand-building, organized by brand lifecycle stages and the categories of the Brand-Building Canvas.

Chinese nationals already make up one quarter of global luxury consumption and therefore represent the biggest group of luxury consumers worldwide (Bain & Co, 2012). It seems that there exists a considerable imbalance between the Chinese consumption and production of luxury. Many Western luxury consumers can hardly name a single Chinese luxury brand. However, although it is not on the radar of many experts and most consumers yet, the luxury business community in China is already emerging in big steps. China became an important manufacturing hub for semi-finished luxury products, which already helped building-up industry-specific know-how. The country is also best representing the entrepreneurial spirit in the luxury segment; there is a variety of Western and Chinese market players setting up China-specific luxury brands. New Chinese luxury brands include, for instance, Longio (watches), Mary Ching (shoes), NE Tiger (wedding dresses), Qeelin (jewelry) and Shang Xia (apparel, interior decoration; Heine and Phan, 2013). For the last decades, consumers and marketers strongly believed in the basic principle: Western stuff is hot – and Chinese stuff is not (O'Cass and Siahtiri, 2013). So are Chinese consumers actually ready for Chinese luxury brands? The objective of this paper is to analyze the challenges and strategies of Chinese luxury start-ups – with reference to the attitudes and preferences of Chinese luxury consumers. As Chinese luxury consumers and brands are still underexplored objects of investigation, which cannot be understood adequately by mere quantitative research, we employ an explorative approach with reference to the Grounded Theory. Based on a selection of (potential) Chinese luxury brands, we derive criteria that help answering the question: What are actually Chinese Luxury Brands? The “Chineseness” of a luxury brand depends, for instance, on the location of its headquarters (Mainland, Hongkong or even Taiwan) and the nationality of key people involved including the founders, designers, artisans and the CEO. Based on an analysis of potential Chinese luxury brands, we identified nine major types of players in the Chinese luxury market and their strategies to create Chinese luxury brands. Major Chinese luxury players include, for instance, Western luxury corporations, Chinese designers and Chinese (state-controlled) corporations. It already became quite common for Western luxury corporations to set-up their own more or less “Chinese” luxury brand. For instance, Hermès created Shang Xia and Estée Lauder Osiao (cosmetics). Other options for Western luxury brands include taking over Chinese luxury ventures (such as Shanghai Tang by Richemont) or acquiring Chinese premium brands or traditional Chinese handicraft brands in order to upgrade them into luxury brands. This is done, for instance, by LVMH group, who acquired a majority share in the time-honored winemaker Changyu. Many well-known Western luxury brands such Chanel or Dior were set up by designers. Accordingly, there exist already some successful Chinese fashion designer brands such as NE Tiger (since 1992 by Zhifeng Zhang), Maryma (by Mary Ma since 1999), Rose Studio (by Guo Pei since 1997), and Xander Zhou (since 2007), who may develop into (international) luxury brands. Similar to entrepreneurs, some big Chinese (state-controlled) corporations corporations aim expanding into the luxury segment because they expect attractive business opportunities, but may also aim to improve their corporate and/or brand image. Examples include Shanghai Vive by Jahwa group and SheJi-Sorgere by China Garments group. The combination of market players and their desire and strategies in creating country-specific luxury brands is truly unique to China. For instance, big luxury houses such LVMH never perceived another market such as Germany or the US as that specific and above all relevant enough to set up a specific luxury brand especially for that market. In the subsequent section, the paper shifts its focus to the Chinese luxury consumers. At the very core of this discussion lie the mobile and multi-faceted (and sometimes ambiguous) associations of China with luxury perception (Rovai 2014). These relate to both consumer behavior (the Chinese market for luxury) and production (the reputation of Chinese producers of luxury goods and services). Based on a content-analysis of current literature and press, we categorize and discuss the factors that may impact the attitudes of Chinese consumers towards Chinese luxury brands with reference to the major luxury consumer segments in China. These factors include, for instance, the increased sophistication of consumers, the international exposure of Chinese consumers, the rejection of “potlatch behaviour”, the empowerment of women in Chinese society, the emergence of a creative class in China, the slow fashion movement, the reversal of intergenerational influences, and the “sinofication” trend – the New Cultural Revolution led by the “young emperors” (or “Sugar Generation”), the generation born after 1978 (Wang and He, 2014). Subsequently, we are analyzing the attitudes and preferences of Chinese luxury consumers with a small-scale qualitative survey. We concentrate on the “young emperors” generation and especially on the segments of white collar workers and the second generation rich. We conducted several in-depth interviews about their luxury preferences and then, following an empathic research approach, we went shopping together with the respondents to develop a better and real-life understanding of these luxury consumer segments. The results are content-analyzed and presented with reference to case studies of Chinese luxury brands. On the one hand, the sophistication and sinofication trends of the Chinese creative class may threaten the big Western luxury brands, but on the other hand, they create a basis for the development of Chinese luxury start-ups and increases the chances of Western luxury SME’s and connoisseur brands in China. Based on our analysis of the Chinese luxury consumer behavior, the paper concludes with some recommendations for the development of luxury brands in China.

Based on research on human personality perception, we propose that endorsers in advertisements transfer metaphoric meaning of their body postures to customers’ brand perceptions and discuss them as a neglected antecedent of brand personality. Our findings suggest that the body posture of endorsers generally enforces brand personality perceptions.