Luxury, Lies and Marketing

Shattering the Illusions of the Luxury Brand

M. Sicard

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137264688
• eBook ISBN: 9781137264695
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Strategy
• Index: Business

Uncovers the truth about luxury brand marketing and shows that like any other commercial brand, they manipulate and influence their customers with traditional commercial techniques. Full of case studies and practical tools for understanding luxury brand marketing the author provides frameworks to help companies with their own branding strategy

CHAPTER 1

Doing Away with Some Received Ideas

ARE WE SURE WE KNOW WHAT WE’RE TALKING ABOUT?

It is difficult, if not impossible, to open a book or read an article about luxury without happening upon the same commonplaces, made up of a few of the following words:

Dream
Magic
Myth
Eternity
Emotion
Fairy
Perfection
Taste
Rarity
Genius
Marvels
Art
Sublime
Mysterious
Amazement
Culture
Spell
Exception

I have nothing in particular against any of these words, but as soon as you start combining them and applying them to luxury, I grow suspicious. These words exhale vapors that are supposedly poetic but that in reality are as harmful for thought as were the clichés of David Hamilton for the art of photography in the 1970s.

We’re going to attempt the feat of avoiding them here, as best we can, for it’s not an easy enterprise. But since luxury loves French culture, to which I am also very attached, I’m going to turn to what’s most profound—and in my eyes also most precious—about French culture. What’s most luxurious, in a sense, for if luxury is priceless, the most priceless thing of all is that which nobody in the world can buy: a culture, and, by extension, a language and a way of thinking, which are inseparable from each other.

The French language, which is known to be rich and precise, is perfect for expressing an idea that 17th-century French classicism summed up in a well-known formula: “A thought well-conceived is clearly expressed/And in the right words is easily dressed” (Ce qui se conçoit bien s’exprime clairement/Et les mots pour le dire arrivent aisément) Boileau, L’Art Poétique, 1674. Before any words are spoken, then, one must think as clearly as possible, and this reflection establishes the reference points of the subject under consideration and does away with confusions, lies, and prejudices.

It is out of loyalty to this tradition, and, in a way, out of concern for intellectual hygiene, that I am setting aside the evanescent vocabulary mentioned above. It’s impossible to define anything with words as nebulous as “spell,” “genius,” “taste,” and “sublime.” These words are so much quicksand on which it’s impossible to build anything.

A more methodical and fertile approach consists—before turning to luxury brands—in defining what is meant by brand (this was the aim of my previous book, Brand Revolution), and what is meant by luxury, without, if possible, falling into any traps. Now there is a trap that is waiting to snare me here, that of believing that I should know better than anyone, since I’m French and was born in the country of luxury. This is the moment to remember that, in order to rightly conduct one’s reason, as Descartes asked of us,¹ we must begin by never accepting something as true until we have carefully verified that it is. And we must do this without regard for the consensus of public opinion about it, the prestige of those who uphold it, or the personal advantages we might hope to derive from whatever it is.

It happens that the first article of faith one encounters when dealing with luxury is the idea of French hegemony.

It is thus this article of faith that we must examine as closely and scrupulously as possible. As it’s very old, we’ll have to go a long way back in history to verify whether or not it’s well founded. And because the French are its most effective and zealous proponents, we’ll also have to dismantle the propaganda machine. This is a tall order, and the best we can do here is to outline it. But it offers the advantage of decontaminating the ground on which, later on, we’ll construct a definition of luxury that’s more suitable, more precise, and, above all, more operational than usual.

FRENCH LUXURY: AN EGO AS BIG AS THE RITZ

To get some idea of the incredible impudence that the French display when speaking about luxury, let’s proceed by means of comparison.

You know what the word “art” means. Your ideas about art may be precise or they may be vague, but on the whole the names and images that are associated with it are fairly familiar to you. Perhaps you’ll think, for example, of Botticelli’s Primavera, a Degas dancer, Picasso’s dove, or Kandinsky’s Blue Rider. Perhaps also of Romanesque churches, the Guggenheim Museum—in New York or in Bilbao—or the Venus de Milo, or a Calder mobile.

So what would you say if someone asserted out of the blue that art, the only real, true art, has nothing to do with any of that, and that art is—and is exclusively, as everyone knows—the art of the Momoyama period in Japan?²

You would surely be astonished, skeptical, even indignant. Even supposing that you knew what the person was talking about, and unless you happened to be precisely a fanatic of the Momoyama period, you wouldn’t believe it. True, Japanese art and its history are extremely rich, but why should they and they alone represent art as a whole? And why this period rather than some other one?

The line one most often hears in France, and that everyone repeats, is that luxury, the one and only luxury, is the one the French invented in the era of the Sun King, shared with the world in the 18th century, and have perpetuated to the present day—as if nothing had happened before, nothing after, and nothing elsewhere; as if the French were the legitimate and uncontested owners of the notion of luxury, and as if the entire world had no choice but to measure itself against this standard and submit to it, in the past and also today.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Although my saying so may offend national pride, the French are neither the inventors nor the owners of the notion of luxury, whatever the specialists, the professionals, and even the academics may say. One hoped for a little more intellectual rigor from the latter, but no: blinded by the brilliance of a milieu endowed with a prestige the university has mostly lost, academics are more likely to look indulgently upon luxury than they are to subject it to a critical analysis.

And yet any historian will tell you that French luxury neither came first nor is superior. The contrary position can only be defended at the cost of distortions—distortions that may be touching when inspired by fine feeling, and possibly understandable in an economic war where all’s fair, especially bluffs, but which, in both cases, are deceptive.

To state that luxury has been French for more than three centuries is to cut up space and time with a magnifying glass and crooked scissors. The only thing that can be said with any certainty is that trade in certain products of French luxury expanded considerably in Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries, before meeting with strong competition—notably from the English—in the following century, then enjoyed a resurgence in the 20th. But luxury goes beyond French and even European borders, covering an area so vast that it goes back to prehistoric times and extends into the most deserted corners of the planet.

The only thing we can say without fear of being mistaken is that the 17th and, above all, the 18th centuries in France were a pinnacle in the history of luxury—but not the only one, and not the most sumptuous in a long history: Europe, Italy, Spain, England, and Flanders also experienced “golden ages.” It is also true that French high fashion, leather goods, perfumery, and wine moved to center stage over the 20th century. But the 20th century is over, France no longer has a monopoly on high fashion, its perfumery faces ever increasing competition, and in many sectors France is even losing ground: in porcelain, for example, or in shoemaking, or in watchmaking, where the Swiss prevail. In the automobile sector, the luxury brands are English, German, and Italian. In hi-fi and home cinema, they’re Danish (Bang & Olufsen), American (Bose), and German (Loewe). Even French wines, apart from champagne, are starting to lose their supremacy, which has never been universal.³ And when an American magazine devotes a long article to the most celebrated chefs in the world, it cites David Chang,⁴ Jamie Oliver, and Ferran Adrià. If the French weren’t all transfixed by the ecstatic contemplation of their dazzling national ego, they would have noticed a long time ago.

A NEGLECTED HISTORY

Oddly enough, few people take any interest in the history of luxury. Entire books are written on the subject without any allusion to its origins, as if luxury were, by nature, immune to any examination of its genealogy. Even in France, where there should be keen interest, the last major study on the topic goes back to the end of the 19th century.⁵ Since then numerous monographs on table settings, wine, fashion, jewelry, decoration, gastronomy, and various brands have appeared in every sector. But there hasn’t been much of anything about the history of luxury, and nothing that makes it possible to look at the phenomenon from a new angle.

First of all, this is because the definition of luxury is a problem, one that has never been solved. Today, as in 1864, it could be written that:

This word applies to purely relative things, whose elements are very complex and elude exact and scientific definition. Thus have the economists of the last two centuries and even those of our own time discussed in depth the advantages and disadvantages of luxury without being able to arrive at a definitive and satisfying formulation.⁶

The second reason why nobody takes much interest in the history of luxury is that nobody is really concerned about checking to see whether the history of luxury, as we think we know it, might actually be a legend. How was this legend created, and what kind of historical reality does it possess? We can reconstitute it by observing how the French tell themselves the story of luxury, and this without regard not only for truth, but also for mere good sense. The French literature on luxury abounds in peremptory declarations, such as: “Of French origin, luxury emerged in the 18th century,”⁷ or: “Luxury has always existed, ever since the 17th century, in fact,”⁸ which, you’ll admit, makes an awfully short “always.”

But let’s take them at their word, let’s not even stray (at least for the moment) from their own history and borders: it’s blatantly obvious that such notions are absurd. So there wasn’t any luxury in France before the 17th century? You might think so from reading what people are saying, without even mentioning the Renaissance. As for going back still further—pointless: the question is dismissed by stating ex abrupto that “the European middle ages, if you don’t include cathedrals and castles, wasn’t a very luxurious era.”⁹ You even read that the Middle Ages, “the era of Western obscurity, swept away the luxurious products of Antiquity.”¹⁰

Oh really? And yet you don’t have to have a doctorate in medieval history to be doubtful of such statements. Just recall the tapestries called The Lady with the Unicorn or the marvelous miniatures that adorn the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry: the banquet tables covered in golden cups and damask tablecloths, the people in sumptuous costumes lined with fur and adorned with jewels. Think too of the gothic chests studded with precious gems, of the sculpted ivory, of the finely chiseled weapons and armor, of the long trains and the frills and ruffles of the feminine garments.¹¹ Think of the parties where the number of dishes was exceeded only by the richness of the place settings, to the point that Juvénal des Ursins, the Archbishop of Reims, declared in 1468: “There’s almost nobody in France who doesn’t want to eat from silver dishes.” The palace of Jacques Coeur, in Bourges, is of a rare architectural refinement, and to perform its function the roof of the Hospices de Beaune, built by Nicolas Rolin at the time of Charles VII, had no need of the splendid patterns in which it is covered. This was indeed luxury. Have we forgotten that the oldest French chef, and one of the most famous, Taillevent, officiated at the table of Philippe VI and then at that of Charles V, in the 14th century? And that he served them various meats seasoned with extremely rare spices that cost what was then a fortune, accompanied by dumplings wrapped in gold leaves?

Not only can one go back up the path of French luxury much farther than one usually does, but one must do so, all the way to the Middle Ages and even beyond. For well before the Middle Ages in Europe there were the Celts, the Vikings, and the Visigoths. In each of these cultures, which we’re quite wrong to keep calling “barbarian,” there were luxury objects of extraordinary richness and elegance, although the population lived well below what today we call the poverty line. And it wasn’t only the religions of such cultures that drew on the resources of an extremely refined craftsmanship: the jewels of Scythian art, the mastery of cloisonné enamel displayed by the Saxons, the famous crown studded with precious gems donned by Charlemagne, the no less famous Ardagh Chalice, and the miniatures in the Book of Kells, the 8th-century Irish masterpiece—all testify against the nonchalance with which, in France, everything before the Renaissance is expelled from the domain of luxury.

ON THE ART OF DENYING ONE’S MOTHER

If you heed what the “specialists” have to say on the subject, there’s hardly any mention of the Renaissance either—or else just lip service—nor of the considerable role that it played in the birth of French luxury. This is not to say that anyone denies it an influence that is too obvious to be challenged, but, rather, that it’s often passed over in silence, which is at the very least paradoxical when you see how the luxury crowd venerates everything that resembles noble titles, the most enviable of which are obviously the most ancient.

The label “dating at least from the Renaissance” would provide such titles to any trade likely to boast of them, and luxury houses would have no trouble demonstrating that many French arts were already flourishing in that era. Yet they prefer to lop a century off their age rather than appear as the heirs of the Renaissance. Why, when they could claim such an illustrious lineage, do they deprive themselves of it? If their desire for age is so strong (and it is, to judge by the care with which they display their birthdates), why stop at Louis XIV? Why not climb another rung on the ladder of time and prestige, if it is decreed that prestige is directly proportional to age?

Because the Renaissance is first and foremost Italian. Of course, there were the Loire châteaux, but unless you imagine that they burst forth spontaneously, one must give back to Italy that which does not belong to François I. From architecture to glasswork, from jewelry to table manners, from sculpture to poetry, and from weaving to painting by way of fashion, everything that adorned and brightened the French 16th century was imported from Italy. If the origin of luxury were to be situated in France, one would have to grant transalpine genius a preeminence that the French, in this area, are unwilling to share with anyone—which explains their evasive discretion about this sumptuous era, whose brilliance cannot be directly attributed to them. When you claim to descend directly from the Sun King, it’s not in your best interest to let the genealogists go through your family papers and unearth a foreign ancestor, illustrious though he or she may have been.

Nor is it in one’s interest to show that it’s not just you but the whole family that inherited the genius of luxury from someone else, in this case the whole European family. For the Renaissance fueled, inspired, and infiltrated minds and tastes from one end of the Old Continent to the other. Each Renaissance hotbed was a crossroads teeming with intellectual currents, artistic influences, and all kinds of wealth. Welcomed in the south by the Portuguese and the Spanish, in the north by the Dutch, these currents flowed just about everywhere … except in France. There, no bounty flowed in from South America...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Introduction
• Chapter 1   Doing Away with Some Received Ideas
• Chapter 2   International Luxury: The Clash of Cultures
• Chapter 3   How Luxury Brands Work
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index