Eponimo offers its clients advice and expertise in implementing steps to ensure your brand not only survives, but thrives. Creativity plays a key role in creating such a premium image. Many luxury brands achieve legitimacy and fashion authority as a result of the creative talent of their design teams who respect the brand heritage and yet continuously reinvent it.

Todays affluent consumers, irrespective of which country they belong to, have similar lifestyles, tastes and aspirations. They want the best and the latest in fashion.

Many luxury brands have entered into categories where they have no expertise because they want to be “lifestyle” brands. Some categories are logical extensions for a luxury brand but most are not a good fit and will be marginally profitable. Fashion brands are notorious for pasting their logo on anything that they think will generate growth regardless of the impact on the long-term brand equity, and the long-term bottom line. Wealthy consumers are highly discerning, educated buyers. Several years of Luxury Institute empirical research shows that wealthy consumers prefer, and are willing to pay a significant price premium for, brands that are specialists. Conduct a rigorous assessment of your brand’s category portfolio and unflinchingly eliminate marginal “non-core” categories. Renew your focus onwhat you do best and innovate within those categories. A second and related issue is whether there should be line extensions beyond the core category. Such a strategy may make operations more complex and drive up costs. Moreover, transferring the brand's fashion authority from the core to another category may not be as simple as it sounds.

One of the great ways to kill a luxury brand, albeit slowly, is to move down-market. If you are a luxury brand that really aspires to be a mass brand, then create and execute a strategy to be distributed in as many mass market outlets as possible. If you aspire to be a top-rated luxury brand, then you must serve high net-worth consumers, be unique and exclusive, limit your distribution, and maintain impeccable service. Great quality is not enough. Focus on going up-market with bespoke, one-of-a-kind, custom-made, made-to-order, limited edition product and deliver service to match. Only then will the new, growing multi-millionaire consumers globally be willing to pay a premium for your products long-term. Channel management issues are focused on dropping marginal and unfocused retailers to improve the strength of the brand franchise for those remaining. Investment in flagship monobrand stores augments the brand's prestige and presents it as a lifestyle concept.   Continue...

To get started with the program or get answers to your questions, contact the Eponimo Sales Director on 61 (0)2 93452499 or sales@eponimo.com.   More...