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.