Fashion Marketing, Book Review: Let Them Eat Cake, by Pamela Danziger

Fashion Marketing: A few weeks ago, we reviewed “Trading Up” in this section; this week, we take a look at “Let Them Eat Cake,” by Pamela Danziger.

My opinion: I found "Let them eat cake " more detailed than "Trading up". Pamela Danziger goes beyond the concept of new luxury and gives it to us in numbers, graphs, and tables. The author uses these tools, along with surveys, to discuss luxury consumers, luxury categories, luxury pricing and emerging trends.

To her, old luxury is about a thing, while new luxury is about an experience.

She dates the start of the new luxury era to 1984, when American Express launched its Platinum Card and when Bernard Arnault bought Christian Dior. Consumers now decide whether a brand is a luxury to them, not fashion execs.

I really liked the fact that she was able to stretch the luxury category to non-obvious consumers and non-obvious items, such as consumer electronics. She has the numbers to back it all up.

She spends a lot of time on 3 luxury categories:

• home luxuries (e.g. consumer electronics and linens)

• personal luxuries (e.g. fashion items)

• luxury experiences & services (e.g. spas and travel)

She sees 4 kinds of luxury consumers:

• Butterflies (high spenders, focus on personal and experiential luxuries)

• Luxury Cocooners (Purchase luxury items to maintain their identy)

• Luxury Aspirers (care about things and brands)

• X-Fluents (extreme affluents,  more materialistic than Butterflies)

I really liked her study on pricing for two main reasons. First, in the personal luxury category, there is only one kind of product that is paid full price : fragrances and beauty products. I liked the way that she explained how luxury buyers purchase most things on sale : it is usually not about saving money, but about the joy of finding a bargain.

Contrary to the personal luxury category, the luxury experiences category knows almost no bargains, with the exception being the travel category. With full prices and a lot of growth ahead, luxury services have a tremendous growth potential.

The one thing I did not like is that at time, I felt as if I was reading a study about the 2003 luxury market rather than an overall study. Danziger uses 2003 figures to back up her writing, which is good. But I think some of her text is actually copied and pasted from a white paper she wrote for her company, Unity Marketing. She could have re-written some material from the study before it made into the book.

 
Review: After studying 15 million truly affluent households (those with incomes greater than $75,000 per year), Danziger is able to confirm that the luxury market is changing radically. This book was designed with the marketing guru in mind and was intended to serve as a roadmap to help them decipher what the luxury market now means to the affluent consumer.

Readers will learn things like “how to get it right for the masses” and “how to get it right for the classes” by reading case studies of companies that have done it right when it comes to this segment of consumer. Danziger also discusses why luxury is not as much about cost anymore, and why it is more about how a product connects with the person and their aspirations for ”how they want to live.” In turn, this makes it trickier to market to the luxury consumer.

 Overall, this has been an incredibly successful book and many that have read it have both enjoyed it and learned from it. Well worth a purchase and a read; Danziger can show you how to market specifically to the luxury consumer to come out on top of the competition. That alone is worth it’s weight in gold.