Do you want to attract high-end or affluent customers to your products? How about getting your brand featured in upscale communities?
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 it’s important?
- What is often involved in luxury brand strategy?
- The importance of luxury brand strategy to sell your products.
But first, let me give you a backstory of my experience with businesses that lacked a strategy.
A Backstory: My Experience 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. (This was before I niched down to luxury branding and Shopify website design.)
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.
It would quickly become clear which businesses had a solid strategy in place vs those who had not even thought about it.
The businesses that lacked strategy had no clear direction and typically focused on surface-level things such as the colors and fonts of their website.
Often, they want to mimic their favorite brands, even though they don’t have the audience 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 her website reflected her audience.
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 customers 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 brand, you must focus on your brand’s foundation. Affluent customers have different expectations when they buy at a higher price point.
What is Luxury Brand Strategy?
The term brand strategy is often used in the business world. As more businesses enter the market, more competition exists to reach customers.
Luxury brand strategy is the system for attracting, converting, and retaining high-end or affluent customers.
When you think of strategy as a system, you can use different levers in the system to work in your favor.
Your strategy also plays a key role in crafting the rest of your brand. Your brand strategy determines other elements of your business, such as your brand messaging, positioning, design, and more.
Why Luxury Brand Strategy Matters for High-end Brands?
Without an effective strategy:
- You simply can not design the visual elements of a brand that makes an impact.
- You can not effectively market your brand message. Ensuring that it lands with the right audience.
Yes, some brands jump straight into brand design without a strategy. They often struggle to connect with their audience and get frustrated that their hard work isn’t paying off.
They then find themselves months down the road doing another rebrand/redesign. Because they skipped the steps to create a more aligned brand. That specifically speaks to their ideal customers.
What Is Included In Luxury Brand Strategy?
Now that you’ve gotten a backstory, a definition, and the importance of having a brand strategy for your business. Let’s go over some of the elements of what is included in luxury brand strategy. I’ll do my best to explain this in non-industry terms.
There are multiple parts to luxury brand strategy. You may already have some of these in place. In that case, you would just need to ensure that they align with your business objectives.
Your Internal Brand
Your internal brand strategy is the core element of your brand, including your purpose, mission, vision, and values. Clearly defining this part of your brand helps guide your business. Your team will also frequently refer to it to ensure everyone follows the brand’s vision.
You’ll also use this when you do collaborations or partnerships. So you can make sure that your brand maintains its integrity and holds true to its vision.
Your Target Audience
Everyone is not your customer. With such a wide range of businesses, it’s important to get specific about who you are serving. This will help your business market your brand effectively to the right customers because you’ll know what to say to them. Also, knowing your target audience will help you create better products, leading to more expansion of your business.
When you know your customers, you’ll know what to create for them that inspires them to purchase your products. Sometimes, brands start with their product first before understanding if there is a customer that wants that product. Which could result in lost revenue, months, and years of frustration.
You can avoid that by focusing on your ideal customer and their wants.
Having a clear target audience also allows you to curate a focused email list with your biggest fans. Who are happy to buy when you send out your newsletter or launch new products.
Also, read Your Ideal Customer Profile: Why It’s Important For Your Online Store.
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 business owners think they need to look similar to their competitors. When it should be the opposite, you want your ideal customers to understand the difference between you and your competitors. If you look the same, then you’ll compete on irrelevant things.
Do you know what distinguishes you from your competitors? If so, great, but can your customers tell the difference? If not, you’ll have a problem positioning your brand in the market.
Gaps in The Market You Can Dominate
Finding a gap in the market and filling it can be a great win for your business. Because you’ll be either the only one doing something different or one of the very few. Allowing you to become the go-to, knowing what gaps your brand can fill. It Will set your business even further apart from competitors.
For example, Apple saw a gap in the market and went after it. They have now become one of the world’s top brands and innovators.
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, then 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.
The personality of your brand is baked into each interaction your customer experiences in your business.
Also, read Should You Be The Face Of Your Luxury Brand.
The Messaging of Your Brand
Your brand’s message is vital in attracting the right customers to your business. A luxury brand strategy can help you craft and refine your messaging so your customers are easily attracted to your products.
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 customers connect with your brand is through your story. It will build a deeper relationship with your customers. As they will find relatable elements of your story within themselves. Once your customers relate to your story. It will lead to higher engagement and increased trust in your business.
Working through your luxury brand strategy, we pull out the key elements of your story that will resonate with your audience, helping you connect with your customers and humanize your brand.
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.
Part of your awareness strategy is discovering where your ideal customers are hanging out. Whether that is online, through certain publications, or in communities. You want to know where they are so you can be there too!
But showing up doesn’t matter as much as knowing how you will gauge the success of your interaction. You could measure success through email sign-ups that lead to increased sales or higher traffic that leads to increased conversions.
Your brand awareness strategy will come from defining all the previous elements of your luxury brand strategy components we discussed.
Also, listen to How to Build A Luxury Brand.
Conclusion
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, leading to higher sales and better brand authority?
Discover how we can work together to craft your unique system for your business. Through my luxury brand strategy experience for product-based brands, we’ll hone in on your messaging, positioning, and more.
Get in touch by inquiring, and we’ll set up a complimentary conversation to discuss more details.
