The "1Q - 1A" Series: Paul Nunes, Author of "Mass Affluence" with Harvard Business School Press, and Executive Research Fellow, Accenture, Boston

Paul will be one of the panelists of the "Luxury and Research" discussion at ESOMAR 61st Congress in Montreal, Canada, on the 24th of September. This is what he shared with me on communication, advertising and the creation of the luxury image of the future.

Marco Bevolo: The communication campaigns of luxury fashion brands seem pretty standardized: beautiful image, beautiful –or at least eye-catching- models, and the logo. On the other hand, media and communication are deeply changing, thanks to the viral diffusion of Web 2.0 applications, and luxury brands seem to be lagging behind this wave of cultural change. Do you see opportunities for mass luxury companies and high end brands to possibly leapfrog the actual top luxury makers thanks to a superior understanding of how communication is changing, and –if yes- what early case histories do you see as representative of this possible forthcoming “image revolution”?

Paul Nunes:

There is no question that traditional brands are threatened by today’s technologies, because social networking is changing. Fashion is a social construct; when a person’s society changes, so too does their understanding and perception of luxury and appropriate consumption behavior. Technologies like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Second Life give consumers new networks of associates and new understandings of socially acceptable and desirable behavior. This opens the door to “viral” concepts and preferences, those that spread among consumers in a rapid and uncontrolled way like a contagion. So the threat to established luxury brands is real and high, especially if they miss the opportunity and risks associated with the changing nature of community. 

And yet this threat can be easily overrated. Most people spend the majority of their waking hours the same way they have for decades, and there are new technologies and approaches that continue to make even the most traditional methods of advertising more powerful. For example, Captivate Network runs advertising in addition to other media content on the screens it places in elevators. Today, advertisers are getting their message across on coffee cups, pizza boxes and dry cleaning bags. These may not seem high end, but the point is that there is wider range of approaches to reaching consumers than ever, and every marketer needs to rethink how to cost effectively entice, capture and retain segments of loyal customers. Luxury makers will continue to need to create mystique, exclusivity, and desirability for their products in the minds of a range of customer, This often requires modeling the behavior desired in customers, and that means ensuring customers see the product having the desired effect in the desired environment. If there are new environments where target customers are residing, and new associates these customers want to impress, it makes sense that luxury marketers with want to evolve their marketing efforts appropriately.