The Bastardisation Of Luxury In India – A Note From A Saddened Luxury Professional To The Industry
I am writing this article simply out of frustration more than a great need to arrive as a think tank of any sorts and tried to answer the boring question about. “what is luxury really”? And the hazy understanding of the same creates an unstable understanding and handling of the same. Trying to explain this in as simple terms as I can.
RELATIVE LUXURY is very different from Global Industry standards of LUXURY – As a long-time veteran of this industry – I have survived enough board room arguments with confused professionals questioning “luxury” and what defines it. Majority of them create arguments as related to a consumers social or financial situation – For a customer who is used to buying Seiko watch – getting hands on a Rolex is a luxury and so on and so forth. Sadly, I have begun to suppress a big yawn every time I hear this.
Let me try to define this difference simply – Pure luxury is correlated to the industry standards of customer’s capacity of buying a set of high-priced product or experiences where he understands why he is paying the high price and has a clear knowledge of why that experience is valuable to him. There is an undeniable critical price threshold which is distinctively unaffected by the larger economic dips and surges and is attached to a puritan luxury brand. Somehow, this clear distinction is not understood whilst managing or consuming a brand specially in the Indian subcontinent. You see it everywhere – food, real estate, apparel, footwear and jewellery. The bastardisation is rampant… and it’s becoming amusing. Let me break it up for you and I hope as a marketeer you will find some take away –
Awareness
In the human nature of making a purchase– Awareness is the first step of forming an Opinion, price consideration and a micro preference of the luxury product leads up to a success story. AWARENESS was mostly by word of mouth in earlier times, highbrow Chinese whispers and focused heavily on the Inaccessibility due to price of logistics. In the olden times, to buy silk – One would start from Xi’an, crossed Afghanistan, and went on to the Levant; from there the merchandise was shipped across the Mediterranean Sea. This logistic nightmare is what established the high price of silk. Today, it could be futuristic technology used in high end performance wear brands.
One will struggle to become a true luxury connoisseur if hasn’t enjoyed a close association with the luxury ecosystem for a substantial tenure, tested it, used alternatives and found a unique own DNA of purchase. One can perhaps to learn to implement it as a social protocol but cannot truly really learn it like a subject matter. The difference between Patrons and Customers is that Patrons of brands actually develop a committed relationship with their brands devoid of their popularity quotient.
The Indian subcontinent, an original exploiter of the Maharaja style of luxury living standards, now has 3 broad categories of luxury consumers.
*The Authentics– They firmly believe in their own reasons for consumption. If one identifies them correctly, the marketer will spend a lot less on conversion and enjoy sustained benefits. Sadly, these remain the evasive A++ category who are not even seen often gracing media. Cartier, Roll Royce for example has been enjoying this evasive market for centuries in the Indian context.
*The Arbitrary– The belly of the consumer beast in India – the target of most brands to incentivise to bloat their sales pipeline, are costly to convert as the brand has to educate, differentiate and then be able to make a sale. This sale could be anything from impulsive to a semi authentic need for inclusion which does not require the luxury brand to truly Gratify the customer, but it purely APPEASES the customer via its ownership.
*The Accidentals – Who by accident or a self-prompt make a purchase to enjoy a one-time experience or sporadic purchase.
So how does a marketeer navigate this minefield in India? In 2018 snapshot of why a luxury good is priced this way looks very different– To justify million-dollar price tags, leather goods being on forefront of it the companies seek out best quality raw materials. As an example, to this thought – Alsace a 171-year-old tannery is on the speed dial of most Luxury good giants. The Brands also spend a fortune for the client to be aware, be able to influence their opinions to tamper their preferences to their benefit and inspire a final purchase.
In the Indian context the brands have to add layers of religious, social and sexist considerations. The First mile bastardisation is even greater when the luxury brand is unable to practice its native land practices Even more confusingly so the luxury consumer or the quintessential HNI has differed- over decades the core DNA of a self-made billionaire too has changed globally and not just in India. No more are they polo playing, cigar sipping Argyle wearing 65+ year old men who spend their summers in Necker Islands or Monaco or Cannes. Today it could be a tech millionaire in Pasadena or a KendallJenner, or a Virat Kohli
The fact of the matter is you cannot still predict in 100% clarity that your efforts to sit in the mindset of the new consumer will –
- Happen at all
- Will happen enough to override his desire for other brands
- Will sustain the distraction & financial ease of affordable luxury brands
- Will cohabit with him long enough to pass on to the next generation
- Will become a part of his lifestyle
Does this situation look dismal? No. But one can try harder to authenticate curating or selling a luxury brand.
Start at scratch and reallyunderstand the brand you are pushing or incubating. The Super lux brand heritage and its new age services are just not enough. This fickleness is heightened If the consumer is the Arbitrary or the Accidental. Challenges are that a better Instagram Feed will beat the “touch and feel” of a quieter brand, an omnichannel presence online will beat the personalised brick and mortar experience. In these cases, the Authentics are less likely to change their opinion, the Arbitrary is most likely to change the opinion and the accidental remains wishful or at best erratic.
Selling
The Brands – the true-blue luxury heritage brands are the ones NEVER go on sale at least for a part of their exclusive merchandise and they protect their IPR fiercely.
Claiming to be a super luxury brand while swimming in the lower price bracket is but pure unjustified arrogance from the makers. Where the brand incubation goes wrong is where instead of being a pure luxury or a purely premium brand- they shuttle their practices to appease the sales thereby destroying any future chances of being in ONE AUTHENTIC BRAND BRACKET. True luxury employs Pull strategy for a sale, not push.
Conversely, the puritan luxury brands are being forced to water down some of their sacrosanct selling & promotional practices in order to reach out to larger audience. With e-commerce taking centre stage. India being no easy place to sell with diverse consumers reaching for One brand often leaves the marketers confused where they struggle to maintain their focus laser sharp on one niche audience. The recent news about Burberry burning goods to combat mal practices and fake Burberry products is a double-edged sword according to me.
The Luxury brands who are opening the gates of “behind the scenes” processes via insta feeds and you tube to let the consumer in is a double-edged sword too. The veil of secrecy which is directly proportional to the “exclusivity” of the brands is now marginally lifted. The brand then unwittingly needs to compensate the Arbitrary or the Accidental for their loyalty. Indian Companies trying to access Luxury and lifestyle in order to connect with the customers again is usually counterproductive where they end up servicing the “Arbitraries”. Most events & activations – a hideous mix of celebrities, stage set up, shoddy content dispersement and a desperate attempt to club similar group of brands as giveaways are more often seen than not.
It leaves the Profit head pleased with the hope of sales, it leaves the marketer pleased with the PR they generate, it leaves the audience pleased with another night out however as a Puritan – I can confirm the absolute failures of most of these activations to contribute towards the Brand domination. A celebrity alignment being equal to upgrading the brand forces us to misread traction generated by such alignments to success. I read it as a common “faux pas” in most cases I have come across. This exercise may provide them a step up – footfalls and much needed crowd acceptance which is largely quite the opposite of accessing or building a luxury brand Authentics. One event or a celebrity blitz unless backed up by a constant nurturing across functions almost always fails. Another mistake marketers do in their study is misread the buying pattern. A secondary purchase of a luxury may not automatically convert an Arbitrary to an Authentic especially in the millennial segment. A habitual pattern does however remain a DISTINCTNESS of an Authentic.
The Brand custodians in Indian then splits the budget between these two categories and more than likely- the Authentics (mostly evasive by nature and sitting on the cities A+ Guest lists) contribute as Brand Ambassadors of sorts wherein the Arbitrary is seduced to own the brands.
What happens next is equally amusing
The Authentics being well aware of the brands, atypically used to the brands being used by their earlier generations stick to their pattern of consumption and enjoy the easier accessibility to the brand which is now available in India. However, they are astute enough to make the purchase overseas where they get the entire width and depth of the brand’s retail offering. Conversely, the Arbitrary will go and make a purchase, regardless of brands connect with them, to own it and therefore will not really be an aesthete, but at best a repeat customer who will fade out the moment another new brand is made equally desirable.
The Customers
Wrongly perceiving over opulence as luxury, most of the customers are abducted by the next brand with the help of the magnanimous Bollywood, which has managed to make any designer with a high-ticket price become a creator of luxury. Proximity to taste or a celebrity does not automatically make one a luxury connoisseur or give birth to a pure luxury brand. The brand product must stand taller than all these elements.
The events – Backed by a telecom or a Gutka company, fronted by a designer – and attended by the sponsors, the telecom CXO suite and gutka magnates’ best friend does not make a truly luxurious event. An advert with a known face in a high-end magazine with a full bleed visual wearing a shiny diamond necklace is again not luxury – but begins to be mistaken as. If the product is not A+ – it will be evaded by the Authentics in the long run.
An established international luxury brand as it enters the Indian landscape is thoroughly confused- Does it cater to the profiled with no money or cater to the moneyed with no profile. Who should it bet on to minimise Brand violations and Optimise Sales?
Refreshingly – there are Brands who refuse to give in, and instead are strategically creating “RSVP entries” for this audience, online players, aggregators and experience offerings in forms of loyalty deals, bartered benefits and other marketing tools. Brands aspiring to reach the infallible pure Luxury brand bracket mostly fail to establish their price supremacy long enough to actually effectively utilise their RSVP entry module. The lack of this effective traction is misread as “not enough high-end marketing efforts” which is a rookie mistake. To make matters worse, the entire “influencer marketing” and alienated efforts to align with other luxury brands have been reduced to being entertainment for the evening or at best festive celebrations. Influencer marketing which was traditionally Cinema and Sports have slowly given way to a very unaudited, uncontrolled quality of substandard Bloggers. No amount of influencer marketing, celebrity alignment and barrier of entry will make the brand successful if the DNA is not unique, caters to a certain specific aesthete and has garnered enough brand goodwill to be able to navigate its own growth story.
A growth story of a pure luxury brand will always begin with quality exposure which is expensive, an ironclad resolve to spend enough on establishing in the mindsets of the Arbitrary, a solemn promise to keep the luxuriousness impacting all its functions and consider brand violations as massively detrimental for the brand. What remains to be seen is when do we mature as a luxury audience and customer? A plea to think again ……from a saddened luxury professional.
