Marketing a luxury brand is very different from marketing a brand that excels due to its pricing. From exclusivity to design, people that purchase luxury products have an extremely different list of priorities to people that shop primarily based on price.
Design is one of the most important aspects of selling an expensive luxury good. The world’s most well known luxury brands and fashion houses dedicate a large amount of their advertising and marketing budgets to crafting stylish, effective designs.
If you’re creating a brochure, sign or any other marketing material for a high-end or luxury product, it’s important that you have a firm understanding of the aspects that make luxury marketing effective.
In this guide, we’ll share four tips, techniques and tactics that you can use to design and create signs, brochures, and other marketing materials that emphasize quality, exclusivity and luxury instead of the traditional marketing focuses.
Leave prices out so prospective customers contact you
Since people in the market for luxury products aren’t likely to price shop, it’s worth leaving prices out of your marketing materials. This has two positive effects for your business, both of which are significant.
The first benefit is that leaving prices out of your marketing creates exclusivity for your product, making prospective customers more interested. The second benefit is that leaving prices out of your advertising makes people more likely to contact you.
Not all products are best marketed based on value. When you’re selling luxury, it’s often much better to create an image of exclusivity than to market a product based on its value for money.
Market a lifestyle, not just a list of features or benefits
Signs and brochures for luxury brands can vary hugely in style and content, but they all share one feature in common: few, if any, market a product’s features, while most advertisements market the lifestyle a product makes possible.
From the pursuit of excellent that’s the focus of Rolex advertising to the worldwide travel that’s often featured in Louis Vuitton brochures, the most exclusive brands in the world always focus on marketing a lifestyle, not a product.
Instead of listing your product’s features or benefits, design your signage and other marketing materials to emphasize the lifestyle that’s possible for people that have the product you’re marketing.
Avoid using popular direct marketing tactics in your ads
For most businesses, focusing on direct marketing – generating immediate leads or sales from your marketing materials – is the best way to drive sales and increase the amount of revenue that your company generates.
For luxury products, however, things are a little different. People rarely buy luxury goods because they’re marketed using direct marketing tactics. They’re much more likely to buy a luxury product because of the strength of its brand.
In many ways, branding is the opposite of direct marketing. Focus on establishing and building your brand through your marketing materials and you’ll attract your target audience naturally instead of having to pull them in with direct sales tactics.
Design your signs and brochures around images, not text
Along with marketing a lifestyle instead of features or product benefits, one of the most common elements of graphic design for luxury products is an emphasis on a product’s appearance through images rather than text.
Advertisements for luxury goods are image-heavy, with pictures taking up far more real estate in brochures and signage than text. This is because the image of a luxury product sticks in someone’s mind far more effectively than a paragraph of copy.
When it comes to luxury product marketing, an image really is worth a thousand words. Design your signs and brochures around images, making text a powerful complement instead of the focus of your marketing materials.
