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DAVID YURMAN COO TO LUXURY CONFERENCE: STATUS IS NOT DEAD May 09, 2012 (0 comments)
New York, NY—In a recent address at the Aberdeen Group’s Third Annual Retail and Consumer Markets Summit, David Minster, chief operating officer at David Yurman, said the three key elements to succeed as a luxury brand are experience, status, and value.
In this article in Luxury Daily, he says the old retail model of price, service, and convenience—as well as the belief that a retailer can be great at one or two but not all three—is history. Today a luxury retailer must excel at all three, and provide an outstanding experience and a sense of status to the consumer—all while offering a value that goes far beyond price.
Of these, the most important is experience, and it must be outstanding at every interaction with the product or brand. Social networking is a big part of the experience, Minster said, because it’s very personal and what consumers use to present an image to the world.
Status, which many pundits said was dead after the recession, is in fact quite alive, according to Minster. He told the audience that consumers still do derive a sense of status from luxury purchases.
But Ron Kurtz, president of the American Affluence Research Center, says status is not a driver for all luxury customers. It tends to be more important to new or entry-level luxury customers than to established luxury customers, he told The Centurion in a separate interview.
Finally, though the experience and status of a luxury product are important, consumers in the post-recession economy still want to feel like they’re getting a good price; i.e., getting a value beyond what they pay for.