The return to faster growth in luxury is good news, but it shouldn’t mask the ongoing structural shifts affecting all its sectors.
EVENTS
What Industry Leaders Can Learn from IMD’s Strategy Program
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Over the last decade, collaborations between luxury brands and contemporary artists have gone beyond mere artistic partnerships towards a new kind of luxury branding.
PARIS – Art and fashion have always developed side by side, for fashion, like art, often gives visual expression to the cultural zeitgeist. During the 1920s, Salvador Dalí created dresses for Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiapparelli. In the 1930s, Ferragamo’s shoes commissioned designs for advertisements from Futurist painter Lucio Venna, while Gianni Versace commissioned works from artists such as Alighiero Boetti and Roy Lichtenstein for the launch of his collections. Yves Saint Laurent’s vast art collection, recently auctioned at Christie’s in Paris, testified to his great love of art and revealed the influence of a variety of artists on his own designs.
In the 1980s, relationships between luxury brands and artists were advanced when Alain Dominique Perrin created the Fondation Cartier. In the Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, a book marking the foundation’s 20th anniversary, Perrin says he makes “a connection between all the different sorts of arts, and luxury goods are a kind of art. Luxury goods are handicrafts of art, applied art.”
The Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemparain building in Paris
The return to faster growth in luxury is good news, but it shouldn’t mask the ongoing structural shifts affecting all its sectors.
In a constantly evolving industry, keeping up with innovation and disruption opportunities in the business of luxury is rarely an easy feat.
Due to digital, social and global factors, luxury brands are having to learn to adapt faster than ever. But in in an effort to keep pace, many luxury brands risk sacrificing brand DNA and neglect the time it takes to truly analyse strategy on various levels.
IMD, the International Institute for Management Development, is offering strategic approaches to tackling some of biggest challenges of contemporary luxury management.
Expertise for the Modern Age
Offered exclusively to senior executives of the fashion, jewellery, watch, accessories, home and interior design, hospitality, cosmetics and automobile industries, the program aims to protect brand desirability while gathering some of the most creative minds in the business.
“In this new environment, the ability to reconcile the logic of change with the essence of luxury is essential. Reinventing luxury means being able to reconcile several strategic dilemmas and tensions with agility,” IMD Program Director Prof. Stéphane J.G. Girod explains.
The two-day intensive workshop will take an in-depth look on what it means to be successful in today’s luxury landscape with on-site visits, strategic dilemmas, and thought-provoking dialogue between senior executives, including DLG (Digital Luxury Group) CEO David Sadigh, Ulysse Nardin and Girard-Perregaux CEO Patrick Pruniaux, and JD.com Global Watch Division Director Belinda Chen.
Industry leaders will also be taken on a private visit to Clinique La Prairie, where they'll explore the hospitality, nutrition, spa and medical sectors while drawing implications for their own businesses.
With Marc Mielau, Director Business Development at Rolls-Royce Motor Cars, guests will analyse the strategic, organizational and cultural dimensions of transforming from a pure pipeline business to a platform business where consumers can extend their aspired lifestyle beyond the product.
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Reinventing Luxury
From rethinking product innovation for new experiences to the selective vs. inclusive distribution dilemma, IMD’s strategy program will explore the rise of various emerging platforms which force the industry to reflect and articulate ecosystem management, consumer behaviors, and digital innovation.
“The rise of social media and ecommerce channels forces the luxury world to reconsider the role of the physical store in the mix. Thus, this dilemma consists of defining the respective roles, footprints and investments for physical, digital and social channels as digital innovation keeps accelerating and democratizing distribution through consumer- to-consumer models,” Girod says. “In this context, becoming more inclusive of new distribution channels while retaining a selective distribution is critical.”
The program will also discuss and strategize the undeniable shift toward the Chinese market and millennial consumers while maintaining older and mature-market consumers, whose needs are also changing with time.
At the end of the session, collaborative minds will be able to assess the limitations of the industry while evaluating the most engaging and agile methods for impactful innovation. The program will take place Wednesday, October 10 to Thursday October, 11 in Lausanne, Switzerland. For additional information, please visit IMD.
Cover image credit: Pexels.
Writer at Luxury Society
Before joining the editorial team at Luxury Society, Meaghan was based out of New York City writing for CBS New York and NBC Universal. A Washington-D.C. native, Meaghan also wrote for Washington Life Magazine while studying journalism at university. After moving to Switzerland in 2016, she went on to contribute to Metropolitan Magazine and CBS affiliates before joining the LS team.
