EMERGING NEW LUXURY BRANDS MARKETING ESSAY

5491 WORDS

Let us imagine that we have gone back a decade in time. There is a woman in some part of the world flipping through the pages of a high-fashion magazine. The minute she opens the magazine she is bombarded by images of luxury goods. Luxury brand names like Versace, Chanel, Gucci and Christian Louboutin shout out to her. All she desires is to own at least one piece from these luxury fashion goods. Unfortunately, the woman earns a middling income and can only dream about owning a Versace dress or a pair of Christian Louboutin shoes. Luckily for her, in 2004 Hennes & Mauritz (H&M) came up with a brilliant collaboration which made all her dreams come true.

For a long time access to luxury fashion goods had been limited to the elite classes. Since the 1990s there has been a boom in the luxury market because as times progressed traditional luxury brands such as Christian Dior started facing competition from emerging new luxury brands like Jimmy Choo. These new luxury brands brought in new branding and positioning strategies (Truong et al., 2009). The result of these strategies was the materialisation of ‘masstige brands’. Even though masstige brands are priced lower than super premium or traditional luxury brands, they still hold a place above conventional products and enjoy a high level of prestige (Silverstein et al, 2005).

In order to tackle competition faced from these masstige brands, certain traditional luxury brands