Luxury Brand Strategy of Louis Vuitton Shin'ya NAGASAWA*
* Graduate School of Commerce, Waseda University Tokyo, Japan, nagasawa@waseda.jp
Abstract: By systematically breaking down the strategy of the single Louis Vuitton luxury brand into the four Ps (Product, Price, Place, and Promotion), our aim in this paper is to extract the rules or principles of its brand marketing that differ from that of general consumer goods. In other words, the object is to distill the rules and principles of success strategies for luxury brands as well as to derive a busi ness m odel for success. Showing that the current rise of Louis V uitton is not a coincidence but rath er so mething ach ieved th rough strat egy will su rely b e of in terest to firm s struggling with lack of brand power or those looking to boost brand power.
Key words: luxury brand, brand management, Louis Vuitton.
1. Introduction
Consumers like brand items, while researchers like brand theory. Although scholars also use the word “brand” to refer to the likes of Coca-Cola and McDonald’s, there is a vast gulf between these brands and the luxury brands we e xplored i n t he p revious b ook. I n researchers’ brand m anagement theories, one r arely fi nds m ention o f representative luxury brands like Louis Vuitton or Dior, or of LVMH.
Based on this awareness, we carefully scrutinized the ecology of the unique LVMH firm, considering the nature of the brand as distinct from commodity markets, although small in scale [1].
This time let us focus on the grand champion of the LVMH empire: the Louis Vuitton brand. By systematically breaking down the strategy of the single Louis Vuitton luxury brand into the four Ps (Product, Price, Place, and Promotion), our aim of this study is to extract the rules or principles of its brand marketing that differ from that of general consumer goods. In other words, the object is to