What Is Luxury Brand Strategy (And Why You Need It)
Do you want to attract high-end or affluent clients to your business? How about getting your business recognized for your expertise and great experience?
Did you know there is a strategy behind achieving those goals?
Here is where luxury brand strategy steps into the conversation.
If you want your brand name to be synonymous with high quality and perceived value, you’ll need to nail the strategy behind your business.
In this post, I’m going to be going over:
What is a luxury brand strategy, and why is it important?
What is often involved in a luxury brand strategy?
The importance of a luxury brand strategy to sell your services.
But first, let me share a backstory about my experience with businesses that lacked a strategy.
Working With Businesses That Lacked a Strategy
In the earlier stages of my business, I worked with various business owners, including coaches, personal brands, and enterprise clients.
Each of those clients was at a different stage in their business. Some were just starting, and others had been in their industry for years.
Quickly, it would become clear which businesses had a solid strategy in place versus those who had not even thought about it.
The businesses that lacked a strategy had no clear direction and typically focused on surface-level details, such as the colors and fonts of their websites.
Often, they want to mimic their favorite brands, even though they didn’t have the same business model or demand to use such designs effectively.
For example, for years, personal brands and coaches wanted a website just like Marie Forleo.
What they didn’t understand was that Marie had spent years building a highly engaged audience, and that her website reflected it.
Her strategy worked because she knew her audience and had clear goals.
The businesses that didn’t have a strategy would struggle with:
How to attract the type of clients they wanted.
How to communicate their value to the market.
How to make their brand stand out in their industry.
Often, they believed a website would fix their problem, but it was that their brand foundation was missing.
As a high-end service business, you must focus on your brand's foundation. Premium and high-end clients have different expectations when they buy at a higher price point.
It’s crucial that you understand the importance of brand strategy and how it applies to your business.
What is Luxury Brand Strategy?
Luxury brand strategy is your long-term plan for how you’ll serve your clients through your brand promise, mission, values, and offers.
Think of it as your system for attracting, converting, and retaining high-end clients.
When you think of strategy as a system, you can use different levers in the system to work in your favor.
Levers that give you greater control over the outcomes you want to achieve.
Your strategy also plays a key role in crafting the rest of your brand–such as your brand messaging, positioning, design, and more.
Why Luxury Brand Strategy Matters for Service-based Businesses
Without an effective strategy:
You simply can not design the visual elements of a brand that make an impact.
You can not effectively market your brand message. Ensuring that it lands with the right clientele.
You may be thinking, "But Karen, people create their businesses without a strategy all the time."
Yes, you are correct, some creative entrepreneurs jump straight into brand design and marketing without a strategy.
What you don’t always see on the other side is that they often struggle to connect with their ideal clients, find themselves trying to convince prospects that their prices are justified, and get frustrated that it feels like they are working harder than they should to book clients consistently.
So they start to think that something is wrong with their website, brand visuals, etc. They may be right, so they repeat the process of doing another rebrand or redesign, thinking that will solve the problem.
The real problem is usually that their brand message and positioning are off, which is reflected in their branding and website experience. Therefore, creating a repeated cycle of being stuck.
How can you avoid this? Start by understanding what is involved in brand strategy.
What Is Included In Luxury Brand Strategy?
There are multiple parts to a luxury brand strategy. You may already have some of these in place. Or you may be entirely new to all of this. One of the most important elements of your brand strategy is your internal brand.
Your Internal Brand
Your internal brand strategy is the core element of your brand; it includes your purpose, mission, vision, and values. Clearly defining this part of your brand helps guide your business.
Your Target Client
Everyone is not your client. With so many existing businesses, it’s important to get specific about who you are serving. This will help you market your brand effectively to the right people. Also, knowing your target audience will help you create better services that lead to more business expansion.
Sometimes, creative entrepreneurs start their businesses by working with anyone. If you are just getting started in your business, I recommend doing this, especially if you aren’t sure who you want to work with. The only way you will find out is by actually taking action and doing the work.
Once you have gained experience and been in business for a while, you’ll want to get clear about who your ideal client is and how you help solve a specific problem. If you don’t eventually, you will experience stagnation and loss in revenue by not serving the full capacity of your market.
Your Competitors
Knowing about your competitors isn’t just for snooping on their business. But it’s important to know who they are so you can differentiate yourself from them. Some creative entrepreneurs think they need to look similar to their competitors. When it should be the opposite, you want your ideal clients to understand the difference between you and your competitors. If you look the same, then you’ll compete on irrelevant things, like the lowest price.
Do you know what distinguishes you from your competitors? If so, great, but can your customers tell the difference? If not, your positioning is weak in your market.
Gaps in The Market You Can Dominate
By focusing on your strategy, you can identify gaps in your market for services that aren’t being met, allowing you to be the go-to for that service or solution.
For example, Stitch Fix knew some people didn’t enjoy shopping for clothes. To address that problem in the market, they developed a solution that curates outfits for their clients after they take a quiz. Once complete, their team would pull together outfits for their clients and send the clothing items to their homes. Their clients could then decide which pieces to keep and send the rest back.
Thinking of your own business, what are some ways your services are filling a gap in the market for your ideal clients? Leaning into your strategy can help you become crystal clear on what you specifically offer differently and craft a message that solves that problem to attract your best-fit clientele.
Your Brand Personality
Did you know brands have personalities? Yes, whether that is fun and whimsical or more refined. Building the personality of your brand gives you a basis from which you’ll communicate your message. If your brand is refined, you won’t speak in a loud tone with big, bright colors, which would be a turnoff to your customers.
Your brand’s personality is also conveyed through the written words you use in every business interaction, from social media posts to customer emails.
Your brand's personality is baked into each interaction your customer experiences in your business.
The Messaging of Your Brand
Your brand's message is vital in attracting the right people to your business. A luxury brand strategy can help you craft and refine your messaging so your clientele is easily attracted to your offers.
This happened to me recently when an ad from Our Place Pan caught my attention. They shared all the benefits, and of course, the pan is just gorgeous. So, I went right to their website to check it out.
Your brand strategy will help you to define the core components of your luxury brand marketing.
Your Brand Story
The way people connect with your brand is through your story. It will build a deeper relationship with your audience as they find relatable elements of your story within themselves. When you humanize your brand, it will lead to higher engagement and increased trust in your business.
I work with high-end service providers to distill the key elements of their stories that will resonate with their clients, fostering deeper, more meaningful connections.
Your Plan to Increase Brand Awareness
As a bonus, I wanted to include information about building your brand’s awareness strategy. If you want to expand to a broader market, become known in a new area. You need to think about your brand’s awareness strategy.
A brand awareness strategy is your unique plan for how you will get discovered by your ideal clients. Once you have worked on the other elements of your brand, such as your positioning, messaging, and overall vision. You’ll then use that information to help you market your offers.
Your strategy guides your business
As you can tell, your luxury brand strategy contains many important non-visual elements that influence the direction of your brand.
Once you have this in place, you can proceed to develop other areas of your business, such as your luxury branding and website experience.
How would it feel to have a more aligned brand that attracts, captivates, and converts perfect-fit clients? Leading to higher sales and better brand authority?
Feeling like your brand doesn't match your premium pricing? My 3-minute Brand Clarity Quiz will pinpoint exactly what needs to shift.
