Chapter 5
The art of creating
and managing luxury
fashion brands
‘Branding is not about getting your consumer to choose you over the
competition. It’s about getting them to see you as the only solution.’
L. Aldisert, cited in Dennis and Harris (2002)What is branding, really?
‘Brands’ and ‘branding’ are among the most abused and misunderstood terms
in the business vocabulary. If you ask the average consumer of luxury goods
to define a brand, they’d probably relate it to a ‘brand name’ like Versace or
Dior, or to a product like the famous Hermès Kelly bag. But if you prod
deeper, you’ll discover that consumers have different perceptions, feelings
and attitudes towards different brands, simply because each brand is unique
and customers understand the different messages that brands emit. This
shows that consumers understand the branding concept.
Even more surprising is the range of responses from business profession-
als when asked the meaning of brands and branding. Some refer to branding
as a corporate logo or identity, others believe that it is a company’s trademark
and yet others associate branding with the name of a company or its products
and services, including the processes of new product launches and re-
launches. These features do not define a brand but form parts of the associa-
tive elements of branding.
A brand, as mentioned earlier in this book, is an identifiable entity that
makes specific and consistent promises of value and results in an overall
experience for the consumer or anyone who comes in contact with the brand.
This entity includes names, terms, signs, symbols, designs, shapes, colours or
a combination of these elements. Their purpose includes identifying the prod-
ucts or services of a seller, differentiating them from those of competitors and
providing value to consumers.
In brief, we can simply define a brand as the following:102