Media Mix and Luxury — Campbell Partners

No one NEEDS a luxury product. You WANT it. Want is an emotion. Luxury products have to be clearly, objectively outstanding at SOMETHING. This is where the selling proposition starts.

But it doesn’t end there, and if all you offer people is marginal improvements in function for double or triple the price, you can probably go home right now. Luxury products are about psychic benefits; the coldest place most of us go with our North Face fleece is the frozen foods aisle at Whole Foods.

This recognition is critical when thinking about media mix. PR is essential, because it is less obviously tacky and commercial and needy. Events work because they feel elite and clubby. Product placement works because, really, who doesn’t want to be James Bond?

These three tactics are the foundation of luxury marketing. It is where tactics start, and for many brands, it is where they end. None of these are even counted in most tallies of measured media.

These tallies suggest that digital, print, and TV have roughly equal shares of media spend for “luxury” brands. For “ultra-luxury”, TV almost goes away, digital drops, and print goes way up. Most of the TV left at this point is for tent-pole events like the Masters or the Oscars. “Regular” programming drops off for many reasons, but brand adjacencies are a big one. What ultra-luxury brand wants to follow the commercial aimed at frequent urinators running on the nightly news?

Now we are down to print and digital. Digital buys you cheap brand awareness, but most luxury brands care less about brand awareness than a mass brand would. They care more about brand-building. Does anyone think of digital as a brand-building medium? Can you think of any luxury brand built on digital advertising? There is NOTHING about banner ads that says luxury and glamour. At all.

Print can. High quality paper, crisp images, larger ads that let you see the product in more detail. Done well, it screams love and craft, in a way conveying taste and authority.

CPM doesn’t even enter the discussion. For most luxury brands , that is the last discussion you should be having. If consumers evaluated luxury products on such purely numerical terms, almost no one would buy one. Think more like your customers, and you will be much better off.