Steps Towards Building a Strong Brand Design for Luxury Brand Marketing

Non-Luxury Brands:

While creating a new brand, we want to provide our best to the customers. Moreover, we work our best to reach our potential customers; through Instagram, Facebook Groups, and many other mediums. Eventually, we achieve our goal by targeting a broad range of customers.

Versus

Luxury Brands:

As we enter the market, we ensure there is enough buzz about the same, that our customers look forward to our company and product launch. Focusing on a niche set of customers, we communicate only to educate them about the products and services, rather than informing them about the existence of the company.

Undoubtedly, a luxury brand has a different approach as compared to other brands. Consequently, their brand design requires them to meet the bar accordingly. With that being said, some run-on-the-mill strategies are not off-limits for luxury brands.

With this article, I plan to explore all the elements which eventually lead a brand towards a solid luxury brand design. Moving towards an enhanced set of strategies for luxury brand marketing.

Minimalism

Luxury brands are mostly known for their “less is more” approach. And it begins with adopting minimalism into their overall brand design. However, minimalist design is more than merely smaller fonts.

You transform an idea through a minimalistic design by stripping it down to fundamental components, utilizing clear, concise, and minimal textual style and color variants. Instead of hindering your customers with over-the-top graphics or passages of text, a minimalist design permits you to zero in on a couple of key segments of your brand, which you feel are genuinely significant.

For perspective, let us pick one of the most essential aspects of brand design: Logo

Black Only

A luxury brand logo mostly picks up black color, for instance, logos of companies such as Dolce & Gabbana, Louis Vuitton, and Saint Laurent.

Two-Tone

Statistically, around 95% of high-end brands do not use more than 2 colors in designing their logo. Companies like Tiffany and Co. and Rolls Royce have certainly proved the power of minimalism in logo design.

Simple and 2D

A clear text can only be paired right with a well-selected font. Brands like Jimmy Choo, Dior, and Armani, all use Serif font. Also, to make the logo appear clean and sophisticated, I’d suggest adding zero effects or shading to the same.

Differentiation

From the outside, it may seem like luxury brands are niche-focused, and therefore, have no competition to deal with. Well, it is nowhere near the actual scenario of luxury brands. With the increasing purchasing power of the customers, more and more luxury brands are coming to the establishment.

These luxury brands understand that branding is layered, etched, tried, and an impression of what the audience needs from them- not what they need from the audience. However, with the increasing awareness of the importance of customer experience, luxury brands design their customer experience in such a way that matches the core values, principles, and standards of the brand.

This leads to a higher level of customer loyalty, which is not easily achieved by other brands. This customer loyalty, associated with quality products, and the standards set by the brand and its competitors, all combine to create a requirement of a high degree of differentiation – which is powered and focused entirely on customer experience; mostly by adding value to the same.

All in all, be it a product design, a logo, a social media post, customer experience, or overall brand design – if it is a luxury brand, it has to take a path of differentiation and keep changing the same with time.

Packaging

Putting the above-mentioned point under the magnifying glass leads us to an essential component of luxury brand design, that helps with differentiation as well: packaging. In order to understand it better, we must understand a fact we all must have come across but hardly noticed: buying a product is an experience.

Before the internet became a non-detachable part of our lives, this experience – a.k.a the process of buying – started with the customers engaging with the store representatives. In all fairness, it still plays an important role. However, now most of us prefer receiving our products at our doorstep, which has led to a minor change in the first interaction of the customer with the brand: this interaction does not occur.

Thus, letting the product speak for itself – and for the brand as well. However, with the product comes its packaging. And as luxury brands align with their exclusivity, the luxury products are required to be packaged more carefully and aesthetically as compared to the other products.

It goes without saying, a luxury brand focuses on the ‘five senses rule of packaging of products,’ ensuring that the packaging upholds the prestige of the brand and adds to the excitement of the customer.

To learn from the best:

Every Chanel product comes with a Chanel shopping bag, which has a white Camellia attached to it. As the flower is the favorite flower of Coco Chanel, it adds a layer of brand identity to the packaging and has led to becoming one of the collectibles for Chanel fans.

No luxury brand packaging conversation can be brought to an end without the mention of the iconic, trademarked turquoise box. This box by Tiffany and Co. has been at the center of many studies concerning the right ways of packaging.

Luxury Brand Marketing: Time to Go Digital

Regardless of what you might think, recently luxury brands have entered the tried and tested domain of digital marketing. In fact, around 80% of sales that occur in stores of these luxury brands are compelled by digital mediums. While this does not directly point towards the importance of digital marketing for luxury brands, it certainly sets the potentially crowded path towards it.

Although the marketing of a luxury brand cannot be similar to the marketing approaches of other brands, it is time to explore marketing approaches that work for luxury brands. From understanding your buyer’s persona to exploring PPC and SEO, there is a lot a luxury brand has to discover, and eventually, offer.