A new study shows that luxury brands communicate with consumers in a very systematically distinguished way of advertising campaigns than their premium and mass-market counterparts.
A recent study on brand communication, conducted by Hannes Gurzki, Nadia Schlatter and David M Woisetschläger of Technische Universität Braunschweig, Germany, analyzed 1,700 print ads from208 advertising campaigns of four from each luxury, premium and mass-market brands, as well as the previous study on the communication of luxury brands. The luxury brands are from Europe and have been established as the largest and commercially successful among global consumers.
The study found that luxury brands like Lui Vuitton use enriched signs or codes such as exotic, historically and culturally valuable elements and rhetoric storytelling in their ads. Mass-market and premium products, on the other hand, use signs of everyday occasions and an easily identifiable or aspirational lifestyle, respectively.
In the second finding, the study shows that luxury brands use social and psychological distancing much more than premium brands, while mass-market products were found rarely using distancing in the ads.
The distancing indicates when an ad’s contents are based on factors such as nostalgia of childhood memories, something not found in ordinary life, openly sexual appeals, featuring remote locations or nature-based. Thus, the luxury brands create extraordinariness of their brands and make an appeal to the consumers for traveling from their own world to the distant world of the brands.
Luxury brands often approach their messages, attitudes, characteristics and other items in a more abstract way to their consumers. Premium and mass-market brands use more direct approaches to their consumers.
To read more:
https://doi-org.umiss.idm.oclc.org/10.1080/00913367.2019.1641858
Hannes Gurzki, Nadia Schlatter & David M. Woisetschläger(2019)Crafting Extraordinary Stories: Decoding Luxury Brand Communications,Journal of Advertising,48:4,401-414,DOI:10.1080/00913367.2019.1641858
