That is the playbook: Find your heritage, your traditional values, your long commitment to craft and quality—or make up those attributes if you have to—and then retire the marketing campaign of shirtless models sipping Cristal in the back of a G4, and replace that with an austere, calligraphy typeface of your brand logo and then, below that, something like, “Family Owned Since the Reign of Xerxes.” Or, expect more shots of the product, less of the luxury lifestyle. The goal becomes to communicate the workmanship and quality of that $5,000 handbag, rather than just the buy-in to a cooler class. Thomas Frank, author of the advertising cultural history The Conquest of Cool, observes that “What happens in hard times, traditionally, is the advertising switches to product centric quality, some really tangible aspect of the product.” Hermes, which has traditionally featured its product prominently in its campaigns, often at the exclusion of models and celebrities, would seem to have beaten its competition to showing the Birkin. “Hermes will be fine,” says David Wolfe. “They’re in the right place. But I don’t know how a luxury brand that has been chasing that whole red-carpet thing is going to reposition itself.”
-Luxe Redux, TheBigMoney.com
