Category: Marketing
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What is the deal with prestige pricing?
I found an article which by research terms is very old, being from 2003, but stay with me. The authors, Kumcu and McClure, are going at the idea prestige goods, or luxury goods as I will call them, are often talked about by professionals as having a backward demand curve. In other words, people explain…
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What does quality mean anyway?
Luxury products are of the highest quality. Well, people assume luxury products are of the highest quality. Perceived product quality gets at how people would rank the quality of the product. It is more about what people think than what a company believes to be true. There are seven dimensions of perceived product quality that…
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What does it even mean to be authentic as a brand?
I am working through the qualities that make a luxury product “luxury.” The first is authenticity. But what does that even mean? When thinking about luxury products, that words gets used when thinking about counterfeits. It is a similar concept here. People don’t want your brand to be fake, in a sense. There are multiple…
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What makes a brand “luxury”?: Here’s a definition
On this site, I write quite a bit about luxury items and the luxury industry more generally. But I had moment when I asked myself, “So, what exactly makes it luxury?” Luckily much more determined people than I embarked on developing a definition. A team of researchers –Ko, Costellow, and Taylor—embarked on a journey to…
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Don’t pick causes just because
You know, I’ve seen some commercials that tell you how powerful women are and how they can do anything? And sometimes I wonder something like, “So what does this have to do with chocolate?” It feels like the company wants to jump on the women’s empowerment bandwagon, but it also feels forced and out of…
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There’s more to rap’s obsession with luxury products
Years ago, luxury brands recoiled when rappers mentioned their products in their songs. In particular Cristal had a distaste for it when Jay Z. Times are different now with brands like Tiffany & Co using the rapper and his wife Beyonce has key models for their campaigns. You could look into the past and assign…
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Shopping is a (psycho)social activity
There is someone, somewhere out there who spent thousands of dollars on a bag to look impressive. Think about it this way. I walk into the store not only thinking about the stuff I want to buy, but also what you might think about what I’m going to buy. Will you like it? Will you…
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Did your hormones make you buy that car?
You may have heard the joke before. So and so bought a Porsche to compensate for other things. But what does that really mean? It turns out that your biology really might make you go for those more expensive purchases. But maybe not in the way you’re thinking. Researchers conducted a series of studies to…
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There is a psychological power to luxury
As I sat at the chef’s table of Local Three, I had a moment when I decided I wanted more out of life. I had a literal taste of luxury and started calculating how to have more in life. How do I take part in more elevated experiences with great service and high-quality products? For…