The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute has provided the marketing community with a clear set of rules for how brands grow. Stay distinctive, increase penetration and build mental and physical availability.
These principles are meant to be universal, applying across categories from FMCG to B2B.
Luxury, however, doesn’t sit entirely comfortably within this framework. Not because these rules don’t apply, but because luxury is one of the very few categories where growth itself, if it happens too quickly or too broadly, can become a risk.
When a luxury brand becomes too available or too popular, it can erode the very thing that made it desirable in the first place.
A number of well-known luxury brands have experienced this first-hand. For example, Burberry in the 1990s and early 2000s, when its check became overexposed and associated with mass culture. It became too mainstream and too conspicuous for a luxury brand, attracting audiences it would rather not be associated with, from football hooligans to D-list celebrities. Wearing Burberry was even banned in some venues.
Gucci faced a similar issue in the 1980s and 1990s, when poor brand management practices, including over-licensing, discounting and excess supply, diluted its exclusivity and pushed the brand close to bankruptcy.
Luxury brands need to grow, but doing so without undermining themselves is a delicate balance of art and science. What does a marketing playbook look like when a brand needs to build fame but maintain distance? When it needs to be known by many but owned by few?
This article is an attempt to summarise the rules luxury brands tend to follow to grow without losing what makes them desirable in the first place.
Rule number 1: Own the codes
Both mainstream and luxury brands build recognisability through distinctive brand assets (DBAs). However, the assets that work at mass scale don’t always translate to luxury, and vice versa.
A memorable logo, for example, is essential across both worlds. Taglines, like Nike’s “Just do it” or jingles like McDonald’s “I’m Lovin’ It”, work more effectively in mass markets while remaining largely absent from luxury.
Luxury brands, in turn, rely on a different set of branding tools: brand patterns like Louis Vuitton‘s monogram canvas and brand symbols like Cartier‘s panther motif or Tiffany’s blue box tied with a white ribbon. Other examples include signature product features and silhouettes like Hermès‘ Birkin and Kelly bags, Gucci‘s horsebit hardware and green-red-green web stripe or the case shape of an Audemars Piguet Royal Oak. These codes rarely have the same impact in a mainstream context.
What makes luxury DBAs interesting is how rarely they change. They get reinterpreted in new materials or contexts, but they don’t reset with trends or with each new creative director. Built subtly and slowly into culture through both repetition and restraint, they take decades to fully take hold.
Rule number 2: Never explain, never justify
Luxury doesn’t seek to be understood by everyone. Where mass brands overexplain, justify and reason with their audience, luxury simply is.
Campaigns are built on atmosphere rather than argument. Minimal copy, sophisticated visuals and high production values are used to evoke a feeling rather than communicate a feature. Luxury brands don’t explicitly communicate benefits or RTBs (reasons to believe) and there are no rational reassurances. Chanel doesn’t explain why the 2.55 bag costs what it costs and Rolex doesn’t justify its proposition through a breakdown of what goes into the watch. The brand speaks and if you don’t understand, that’s probably by design.
Which is partly what gives luxury its aspirational pull and partly what makes it deliberately alienating. The opacity and confusion can be the whole point of the communication.
Rule number 3: Restrict to attract
Luxury is built on scarcity and it doesn’t matter whether that scarcity is real or engineered. While mass brands optimise for reach and availability, luxury brands deliberately restrict both.
Physical distribution of luxury brands is tight by design, with products often sold exclusively through branded boutiques in specific cities and neighbourhoods. Digital distribution can be limited too, as some brands avoid selling key categories online altogether. Chanel, for example, has largely resisted e-commerce for its core fashion, handbag and jewellery lines, reserving its digital shelf for more accessible entry points like eyewear, perfume and cosmetics.
Scarcity also extends beyond where things are sold to how many exist in the first place. Hermès customers can wait up to two years for a Birkin, a bag that can cost the equivalent of a decent car. Even then, you can’t simply go to a shop and put your name on a waiting list. The opportunity is typically offered by a sales associate, after a customer has built a significant purchase history and “relationship” with the brand. Ferrari has a similar process and the inconvenience of it is the point – by limiting access, the brand increases desirability.
Another expression of this logic is the deliberate reduction of supply. Louis Vuitton has been known to destroy unsold stock rather than discount it, protecting perceived value at the cost of the product itself.
From a mass-market perspective, this approach can feel counterintuitive, but in luxury it has worked this way for centuries. The harder something is to get, the more people want it.
Rule number 4: Don’t join the conversation
Mainstream brands are desperate to tap into culture and become an integral part of their consumers’ world. Luxury brands play a different game. They define the world people aspire to be part of and position themselves as arbiters of taste.
Where mass brands engage, respond and insert themselves into conversations, luxury brands primarily broadcast. No witty replies in the comments, no reactive memes, no polls, no “we heard you” posts, no giveaways. The luxury brand is always the hero. Its social media feed feels like a gallery wall, curated and mostly one-directional; consumer insight is largely irrelevant in communication, which often resembles art more than a commercial effort. The result is deliberate aloofness, the communicative equivalent of someone who never double-texts.
This logic mirrors a human dynamic. We are, somewhat embarrassingly, often drawn to people who do not seem to need our approval. Luxury brands have always understood that indifference, when performed well, is a strong signal of status.
The luxury brand playbook is, at its core, designed to exclude more people than it includes. Every code, every layer of opacity, every manufactured shortage and every silence sends the same message: this is not for everyone. For many people, that’s precisely what makes it so attractive.
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Magda Adamska is the founder of BrandStruck.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/magda-adamska-32379048/
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