Forget about provocative sexual imagery. Don’t even think about waiflike models. People’s lust for luxury fashion is best stirred by hot shots of the goods themselves, based on a recent survey.
Despite fashion’s longtime use of sexual innuendo and the vogue for marketing that strikes an emotional chord, wealthy adults responded most favorably when luxury goods themselves were portrayed front and center in the print ads of 20 fashion brands. The ads were shown to them in August by the Luxury Institute. “Less is more,” said the institute’s chief executive officer, Milton Pedraza. “The consumer is looking for the product as hero.”
Not that this desire makes a product-centric take a breeze to pull off.
“It’s easy to show products in a way that is boring,” said Reed Krakoff, president and executive creative director at Coach, whose ads were most favored among those of the 20 brands consumers considered. “A lot of times, people look for a gorgeous image and wonder, does it show enough of the product?” added Krakoff, who leads the development of Coach’s ads, created entirely in-house. “We look at [product] as a way to create excitement.”
For example, in a bid to stand out in a sea of color fashion ads, Coach chose a black-and-white palette for its spring print campaign featuring a pair of pumps and a handbag — the first time it had used black-and-white photography in its ads in seven years. “We thought, when it’s not in color, it’s going to catch people’s attention, and we were going for a romantic, vintage-y feel,” Krakoff recalled.
While many luxury ads have long highlighted the products themselves, people may want more of the same because it’s hard to buy into an extravagant fantasy without a strong portrayal of the particulars, observed Raul Martinez, chief executive officer at ad agency AR, whose clients include D&G, Versace and Calvin Klein. “Whether you’re buying a $5,000 bag or a $29.99 bag, you want to see it,” Martinez said. “Luxury is a dream, and you want to buy into that world. There’s an allure to that.”
Related Articles
You May Also Like
The tactic apparently has not been used to its greatest effect, however, as the top-ranked advertising (by Coach) scored a 6.58 on a scale from zero to 10, in the Luxury Institute study. The ratings of the affluent crowd’s 10 favorite campaigns declined on a gentle slope, bottoming at the 5.24 accorded the ads of the Calvin Klein Collection, ranked 10th by those adults.
Part of the problem, Pedraza said, is that “there is not a great deal of consumer feedback that goes into creating these ads. Many of the companies said they are not doing ad testing.”
Affluent adults who were asked what main message they took from a Dolce & Gabbana ad picturing women in suggestive poses amid haystacks made comments ranging from “funky, fresh, fun fashion” to “It comes across as way too much sex among women.” The ad was not among the group’s top 10 favorites.
For the popular Coach ad, in contrast, there were numerous interpretations of its message, such as “Coach sells (or has or makes) shoes” and more than a dozen references to the portrayal as either classy, classic, elegant, expensive or fine.
Neither Coach, nor Polo Ralph Lauren, whose Polo Jeans G.I.V.E. ads rated as the second favorite among the affluent adults, solicit opinions from consumers about ads while the spots are being developed or after they have been seen.
“Our philosophy here is that we are the consumers, and we use our own gut instincts,” said David Lauren, senior vice president of advertising, marketing and corporate communications at Polo Ralph Lauren, which seeks to address an aspirational sensibility with all of its brands. “Sometimes the product is the hero. Other times, it’s a lifestyle shot with no product or with product and a model,” Lauren added.
Style and design were the biggest influence on people who purchased luxury fashion goods in April through June, reported 610 of the 1,000 consumers who bought such things, in Unity Marketing’s second-quarter Luxury Tracking Study. “So ads [mostly] featuring products are zeroing in on that,” noted Unity president Pamela N. Danziger.
While acknowledging it’s difficult to measure a print ad’s sway over consumers’ purchases given the many possible influences, Krakoff said Coach’s black-and-white campaign was probably effective since the bag, the brand’s priciest ever at $798, “sold out twice.” (Previously, Coach’s highest-priced bag was $498.)
Celebrities featured in ads — such as Halle Berry’s turn in the Versace campaign — did not make people any more or less likely to buy the brand advertised, the Luxury Institute found, but the celebs did heighten people’s awareness of them.
Consumers signaled how effective they found the print ads for the 20 luxury fashion brands by considering their relevance, clarity, distinctiveness and appropriateness for the label being marketed. In the case of seven of their 10 top-rated ads, people considered it equally likely they would buy those brands after seeing the ads. The notable exception was Calvin Klein Collection, which placed as the seventh most-likely brand they would buy, after seeing ads that ranked as only their tenth favorite.