The Luxury brand industry can survive and thrive the recent Dior and Armani human rights scandal

It's a watershed moment and a great opportunity if used wisely, says Stefan (a former fashion brand CMO)

LONDON, LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM, August 23, 2024 /EINPresswire.com/ -- With the current scandals in Italy involving luxury makers including Dior and Armani regarding human rights abuses and the manufacturing of their products, big questions concerning the luxury fashion industry's survival are being asked. Will these and other prestige brands including the industry as a whole be damaged beyond repair. SXTC-DYADICA's brand strategists and experts believe not and, if looked at correctly, this may be a rare opportunity to empower and revitalize the industry, market, and its key players.

Brand marketing experts know the true value and the power of luxury brands is not so much in the quality of their products as it is in the strength of their brands and the perception of those brands in the minds of the public. Literally, 90% of the choice and preference of a luxury brand that leads to purchase is not the item itself, but the luster created by the brand identity which is often carefully built over decades. This usually involves huge investment, particularly in media, to create the public perceptions of desire and exclusivity of the brand and its products. What could be called the “greatest mind game of all” involves mostly “brand” and not actual product innovation and quality when it comes to mass luxury fashion success.

The literal billion-dollar question now that the window is open and we can clearly see inside Santa’s workshop is “can the mass luxury industry now survive and still justify its premium pricing structure?” And can prestige brands wisely us this crisis as a “moment of truth” opportunity?

SXTC-DYADICA Global Brand Consulting’s director Stefan Paul believes the answer is “yes” to both aforementioned questions—with some provisions. “We can these “moments of truth” for brands and they can be valuable occurrences whereby brands can examine their weaknesses and rectify them for the better of the brand, industry and society. We saw this with the Tylenol scare poisonings in the early 1980’s where the brand took immediate control of the situation and stepped up to the plate forsaking profit for customer safety.

Definitely, this scandal has hit hard as it involves literally the Italian government putting these companies into administration or in other words under the control of an Italian court. Luckily, so far, only two of the major players have been implicated— so that's where the most damage is being concentrated. The other players in the market, including super-brands such as Prada and Gucci, are so far unscathed and have distanced themselves as far as possible from Dior and Armani. There's no doubt that the industry as a whole is quickly examining and revising their manufacturing setup hoping no more potential revelations surface regarding other brands. The industry hopefully is also viewing this as a “moment of truth” and frantically trying to figure out marketing and communications strategies, plans and tactics to ward off and even reverse the negative stigmatism concerning not only the production quality and mass manufacturing realities revealed but also the price justification of their goods which are what the industry is based on.”

“It's a watershed moment and a great opportunity if used wisely, says Stefan (a former fashion brand CMO), whereby individual brands must communicate to vast amounts of consumers and to society that they are different than Armani and Dior, and indeed are producing their goods in a genuine Italian/European artisan way— and not a mass 3rd world factory model. You will start seeing more and more content showing “handmade” and “quality” manufacturing aspects, PR articles, commercials, print ads and guarantees by luxury brands that their products are indeed created by legitimate “European Craftsman” in an atelier environment which costs large amounts of money to do. In other words, you're going to see the message pulsed to the public that “the value of luxury goods has always been and still is there” by the vast majority of the leading brands in the luxury fashion goods market. This is already happening across their websites on a big scale.”

“This is an industry based on long-term know of the concept of ‘brand”, creativity and brand innovation and it certainly isn't going to roll over and die anytime soon. These are masters of brand, perception and reinvention, and you will see in a year or two that they will have taken this crisis and hopefully used it as a steppingstone to something better. Literally, a long-awaited reinvention with augmented brand stories and new perceptions to continue to entice and build long term-brand loyalty with their consumers,” says Stefan. “It may even birth a luxury brand renaissance or at least a re-birth of sorts.”

For hundreds of thousands of employees and untold trillions of dollars in market size and trickle-down economic activity, let's hope so.

SXTC-DYADICA Global Brand Consulting are Brand Marketing Experts taking Startups, SME, and Fortune 100 brands to their NEXT LEVEL locally and worldwide. Founded in 1981, DYADICA is a boutique consultancy that has grown to over 5000 client engagements across hundreds of clients (including start-ups, SME, Fortune 100, and nation brands) around the globe (North America, Asia and the EMEA). DYADICA also has decades of industry-leading brand ideation via books, white papers, and articles changing the way brands think and operate with its works and constructs published in some of the world's best-known journals and newspapers, books, as well as taught in leading business schools and agency training programs globally. www.dyadica.co

Robert Sharm
SXTC-DYADICA Global Brand Consulting
+1 844-392-3422

Robert Sharm
SXTC-DYADICA Global Brand Consulting
+1 844-392-3422
email us here

SXTC Global Brand Consulting