2.2 The new consumer

New clients will evaluate products and buy them as a function of their individual situation. For example, a woman may in the course of one day buy Zara jeans, a Celine Jacket, and Wolford hosiery. She may end her day shopping at Carrefour and buying coffee because of a cut-price promotion. This apparently changing behavior is what specialists have tried to understand: Customers today have new expectations and new patterns of behavior.

New customer expectations

Customers are not rational when they purchase a luxury object. They don’t claim to be rational. More than anything else, they value the affective and aesthetic contents of their purchase and perceive the different products along such lines.

They are effective because they consider their own pleasure to be more important than any other rational criteria. To judge a product on rational criteria would reduce their shopping pleasure. As they compare different products, they value intangible elements like the sophistication of the atmosphere in the store, the opportunity to go to an area of the town where they can meet people, or, even better, famous people. Even the type of music they hear in a given store can condition the way they perceive products from a particular brand and, ultimately, the way they buy.

This affective component of the consumer information process is used in advertising. Luxury advertising is not only based on information. It is based on the fact that it should surprise, attract, and communicate a specific mood.

A second expectation relates to a need for beauty, the belief that a product should be evaluated by its shape, its special feel in the hand, the types of fashion models used by the brand in its advertising, of the aesthetic value of its advertising.

This is one of the reasons that the aesthetic elements of a brand are so important in its development. People associate different aesthetic values with different brands. Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent belong to completely different universes. This should be reflected in the shape of the perfume bottles, the concept of the ready-to-wear stores, and the shopping bags client are given for their purchases.

New customer behavior

Customers are eclectic. They want to be different from the crowd and they want to indicate to everybody that they know what they are doing. Patrick Hetzel, a French economist, speaks of a toolbox by which customers can define what is best for their given mood or their specific style. They do not want to rely on a single brand. The “total look” (all Chanel or all Versace) is completely out of fashion today: It does not show who you are and what you have decided for yourself. A creative mix between Givenchy and Zara shows that you are creative and that you have taste.

Now, through, eclecticism has some limits. Customers still want to belong to a group and are rewarded by this group for the choice they made. Today, they want to be similar to a very small number of individuals that they have selected as a part of their small, tribal group.

Consumers are also looking for hedonistic values. They prize their own pleasure more than anything else. Here again, they do not look only for the functional elements of a product’s attributes, but to the imaginary world that they have created themselves and that becomes their own world, leading to their own vision of luxury in general and individual luxury brands in particular.

The result for luxury brand management is quite clear: Sales trends are changing rapidly and brands that are successful are those are able to give an added cultural, aesthetic, and hedonistic value to their overall identity.