Do Young Indians Buy Luxury Because They Think It's Fashionable?

Can Indian luxury consumers adhere to a luxury brand’s value when they just do not know them?

From monogram canvas Louis Vuitton pochette, Gucci interlocking GG belts, to Lady Dior handbags – Bollywood songs and Instagram's influencer marketing has played a major role in influencing Indian consumers fashion sense and sensibilities. 

The young Indian tourists who travel to destinations that house outlets of designer luxury brands London, Milan, Paris - who end up at a Gucci or Louis Vuitton flagship store know why they do this? Or do they simply imitate the behaviour prevalent on social media of others like them? This is indeed more fashion than a luxury!

Luxury and fashion are opposite concepts:

Fashion is a very transient and fragile concept that needs to be continuously revisited and reimagined. Luxury, however on the other hand is about long-term value.

The notion of luxury is married to the selling of dreams and not wants or desires. 

Fashion can be as simple as just knowing which celebrity wears what brand. However, luxury does not usually need celebrity endorsement; indeed, it is one of the major ‘anti-laws’ of marketing (Kapferer and Bastien, 2012: 77).

Owning a Chanel 2.55 bag should make you feel that you have accomplished the sense of unlocking the Chanel woman within you. 

Two consequences of conflating the two concepts of Luxury X Fashion

Today’ scenario of luxury in India is accelerated by the concept of “Desire”. Desire to own a brand – be it a Louis Vuitton, Hermes, Gucci, Prada ….. This is satisfied by mere consumption. And as we know – human desires are unlimited!

Unaware of Brand Values (Uneducated Consumerism):

In an emerging country like India, home to the world’s largest millennial population (AT Kearney Report, 2016)-it is the millennial who possess high spending power, and are driving and ruling the entire consumer market. Their preference for luxury is more as compared to Gen X and baby boomers which is highly shaped and influenced by social media. Indian consumers often define luxury as expensive, high quality and in fashion.

As demonstrated by anthropologist René Girard (2005) the fashion desire rests on a mechanism he calls the ‘triangulation of desire’. Consumers do not desire the product or brand per se, but rather the desire of another person. 

Indian consumers today do not differentiate between fashion and luxury. They conflate the two concepts. However, if luxury happens to adopt a fashion business model, it will lose on its dream-based source value. The nouveau rich in developing country like India come from backgrounds where they do not yet have the same advanced cultural sensibilities as the ‘old rich’(Hermes was known for its exceptional quality of saddles and gradually diverged into the luxury handbags or differentiating a bottle of good champagne from the average). They make many of their decisions based on price and popularity, on what is fashionable today. The enactment and consumption of luxury in mature countries are very different.

So can consumers adhere to Gucci values when they just do not know them? The same goes for all the other brands. It takes time to learn what lies beneath a brand. 

Lack in Brand Loyalty:

There is another consequence of this misunderstanding and conflation of the luxurious and the fashionable, is the lack of loyalty to brands. Fashion is whimsical.

Consumers rarely have one brand that they resonate with which speak and represent their brand personality.

It is more about acquiring the latest drop collections from various brands which are a topic of discussion in the fashion forum.

As Patrick Thomas, former CEO of Hermès, bluntly used to say: ‘When a product sells too much, we discontinue it immediately.’ His reasoning is simple: after-fashion comes out of fashion. Luxury does not aim to become a bestseller but rather a long seller.

The concept of brand dream potential, brand luxury, brand tradition, brand prior purchase and brand awareness – holds less of a thought, while considering making another luxury purchase.

How can Brands help build loyal customers and not mere followers?

Indian consumers need a more educated and in-depth understanding of luxury to adopt it as a lifestyle and not a mere fashion phenomenon. Mature countries like France, Italy have had at least a century to learn the values of luxury houses. 

So how can new consumers from the high-growth countries be endowed with this innate knowledge?

Luxury brands need market penetration in terms of Knowledge. They will have to educate their potential clients through exhibitions and pop-ups, creation and diffusion of brand content on the web, direct contacts and so forth. 

Currently, the major focus has been on the China market given to the extreme potential they hold.

Do we see this happening in Indian market anytime soon?