It is often said that to get to where the best of the best is, you need to do what the best of the best is doing. When it comes to marketing in Sydney, there is no better way to up your business’s game than by enlisting a design agency and studying what luxury brands are doing ‒ and doing well.

While many businesses suffered drastically during the pandemic, luxury brands maintained or grew their reach using experiential, immersive and experimental marketing strategies. Regardless of your brand’s price point, this shift in the marketing perspective HAS and WILL continue to impact communication between iconic, successful brands and their fan bases ‒ or customers.

THRIVING IN AND AFTER THE PANDEMIC

Surprisingly, while mainstream brands slashed prices during the pandemic to encourage sales and stay afloat, luxury brands like Louis Vuitton bumped their prices and enjoyed not only growing their perceived prestige in the market place and also recouping losses.

While this strategy was (at least in part) attributed to these brands’ control of their entire supply chains, the decades-long relationship they had successfully built with customers helped the brand retain trust ‒ and thus sales. Luxury brands often call to attention how they are over (or close to) a century old and how they prize localised, handcrafted production processes.

During the pandemic, luxury brands demonstrated how consumers are now demanding (and getting) meaningful relationships with brands that they love and how they are willing to reward brands (by buying from them) for taking the time to build these relationships with them.

THE POWER OF HYPER-PERSONALISATION 

A one-size-fits-all marketing strategy no longer works. Millennials and Gen Z customers, as well as other customer segments, are now drawn to hyper-personalised campaigns that ooze authenticity. Luxury brands include personalisation in their strategies by adding a first name tag throughout their email newsletters and by creating vivid immersive experiences for customers to shop in.

The most notable way that high-end brands are speaking to consumers, rather than at them, is how they have leaned into creating extremely personalised marketing campaigns in a local context.

LEVERAGING LOCAL

In 2017, Saatchi and Saatchi surveyed small-towners across the US and confirmed that more than 95% of them had a sense of pride in their community. It’s no wonder that the likes of Nike, Gucci and Prada have achieved overwhelming results by launching hyper-localised, suburb or geographic-based campaigns that focus on pop-up experiences, souvenir collector items and limited edition collections or packaging.

By launching their “Nothing Beats a Londoner” location-based campaign, where they focused on well-known local areas instead of tourist attractions, Nike’s online searches skyrocketed by 93% in London and 54% across the UK. Zara partnered with Asian talent Susan Fang to launch a Lunar New Year release in only China ‒ most of which sold out in just three days!

Other brands can learn from successes like these by tailoring everything from billboards to social media posts to packaging or product tags by targeting the country that they’re marketing to through the small, local community they’re trying to bond with. Language, visuals and messaging demonstrated through your brands should all fit with the unique community’s history, culture and preferences.

It’s important for businesses to note that this kind of localised marketing will require greater creativity than ever before. Local marketing experiences cannot be cut and pasted in another country. For example, Prada targeted Shanghai-ians in 2021 by branding a wet market and packaging food items in Prada packaging; limited edition paper bags were given out to customers who spent more than $3. While Prada plans to roll out something similar in the likes of Milan, New York and Rome, they will curate the outreach marketing event to the area, focusing on food markets or cafes that locals visit often.

LESSONS TO LEARN FROM LUXURY BRANDS

As for your brand (be it a luxury label or not) there are many high-end marketing tactics that you can repurpose in your own business. One of the most important is understanding that local reach has become more valuable than global reach, and everything from your product development to your ad spend needs to reflect that.

Secondly, if there’s one thing luxury brands do well, it’s that they habitually, constantly and uncompromisingly stick to their unique brand voice. By consistently committing to your brand’s look and feel, you’re nurturing trust between yourself and your customers.

Your business can also reap the rewards of a ‘luxury approach’ to marketing by realising that it’s become all about relationships. Consumers no longer want to be sold or advertised to. They want a meaningful, long-lasting relationship with their favourite brand that isn’t afraid to show up in the local community and take the time to tailor their message ‒ and including their product or service range ‒ to their unique and very specific needs.

In this era of fast-changing consumer trends and ever-evolving marketing strategies, partnering with a reputable, experienced marketing agency will help your business drive sales, gain market share and increase profits. At Brand for Brands, a design agency in Sydney, we offer connection-based marketing services that are built on creating experiences for your customers.

If you’re ready to market your brand the way the luxury giants do, let’s talk.