Sustainable Luxury Brands

Luxury brands used to sell themselves. High-quality materials, skilled craftsmanship, and unsurpassed aesthetic beauty made luxury products the only option for people with the means to buy them. Professionals of a certain generation were expected to have a Burberry trench coat in their work wardrobe. Young men made their intentions known by investing in a Cartier engagement ring. Executives bought the Mercedes after earning the promotion.

The luxury business represents an interesting opportunity for companies that are able to market excellent products also because of its extraordinary evolution. Indeed, the luxury sector has been characterized in the last decades by changes in terms of product features offered by companies and also in terms of the way in which customers approach high-end products.

The relationship between the luxury industry and the sustainability movement is quite complex. On the surface, the values associated with luxury and those promoted as sustainable are widely seen as antithetical (e.g., Beckham and Voyer 2014; Strong 1997; Torelli et al. 2012). Luxury is associated with excess, hedonism, superficiality, and ostentation, while sustainability evokes altruism, sobriety, restraint, and morality (Carrier and Luetchford 2012; Widloecher 2010). Economically, the luxury industry seeks maximum gross margins and, as a result, luxury providers do not emphasize cost reduction, but rather they focus on value creation, with the aim of making the buyer feel like a celebrity. This focus on quality over costs is maintained along the entire value chain, beginning with the selection of high-end production materials and continuing through the phases of production, selling, servicing, and branding. In contrast, sustainable development focuses on values such as parsimony, moderate consumption, and equality, which privilege economy over high quality.

In Chap. 3, we outlined the general idea advanced in this book whereby in contrast with prevalent research studies suggesting that consumers mostly associate luxury with unsustainability (e.g., Bechkam and Voyer 2014; Kapferer and Michaut 2014; Torelli et al. 2012), we argued not only that luxury should be associated with sustainability, but also that luxury is inherently sustainable. This is because, for instance, the longer life that characterizes luxury products compared to conventional ones reduces the amount of waste derived from the use of natural resources (Guercini and Ranfagni 2013; Janssen et al. 2014). Moreover, luxury companies (particularly in fashion markets) may play an important role in sustainability development because of their commitment to “hand-made” quality, which allows them to market products designed to be “timeless” and based on craftsmanship and preservation of artisans’ skills (Joy et al. 2012). Luxury companies need to increase their awareness about such a potential that they have and act accordingly. This understanding becomes even more crucial in the light of the fact that luxury consumers, as well as consumers from other sectors, are increasingly calling companies to become more concerned about making a positive contribution to the environment, the society, and the world they live in. Today’s consumers have many ways to identify socially and environmentally responsible companies—and they are more motivated than ever to support companies whose values match their own. In Chap. 5, we will introduce the idea that many luxury companies have the opportunity to be role models for the entire market when it comes to embracing sustainability. In this chapter, instead, we reinforce such an idea by more closely exploring consumers’ perceptions about sustainable luxury, investigating whether and how consumers might differ in their approach to luxury purchasing.

In Chap. 3 we argued that luxury and sustainability are complementary concepts, and demonstrated some of the ways that early movers in the luxury market are leveraging their natural strengths to become more sustainable. In Chap. 4 we focused, instead, on the key pillars of sustainable consumption. Taken together, the previous two chapters suggest that luxury companies have a large, often underexplored, potential to leverage their being sustainable, thus fulfilling the growing global luxury consumers’ concern for development. In response to such an increased luxury consumers’ sensitivity toward sustainability, companies are pushed to adopt ever-stricter sustainability standards. With the shift from “conspicuous consumption” to “conscientious consumption,” responsible consumers have become more informed about brands and products of all kinds—luxury and non-luxury alike.

The sixth and last chapter of this book offers readers some knowledge about the state of the art in sustainable luxury research. Since such a research stream is quite broad to be effectively investigated in a book chapter, we had to choose those topics that might be considered as particularly “hot” and relevant in today’s academic and managerial debate. In particular, we chose to shed light on research insights into the following areas: (1) sustainability and innovation, (2) CSR, (3) communication, and (4) cultural differences.

Words that one typically associates with luxury may be excess, hedonism, and status, while words that one typically associates with sustainability may be equity, sobriety, and altruism. How can concepts carrying such diverse, almost opposite, association be paralleled? How can the idea of sustainable luxury be the core subject of a book? While many might think of sustainable luxury as nothing more than an oxymoron, especially in the last decade, it has become a very hot topic. Similar to consumers of any other sector, consumers of luxury goods all over the world have been increasingly becoming sensitive to the contribution they might give to people, society, and the environment through their purchases. Luxury companies, in turn, seem to have become aware about the importance to be more sustainable. Sustainable initiatives undertaken by a number of big luxury companies are numerous, although in many cases companies seem to be skeptical about the opportunity to increase the perceived value of their luxury products via association with sustainability. In addition, much academic research to date has been much more supportive to the idea that luxury and sustainability are incompatible and conflicting concepts than to the idea that they may successfully co-exist. In sum, both luxury consumers and companies are becoming increasingly sensitive to the issue of sustainable luxury, but why luxury and sustainability should be considered much less conflicting than much previous research has suggested is still not clear. Thus, luxury marketing managers know the importance of sustainability for the future of luxury brands, but they still do not know exactly how to combine luxury and sustainability and how to manage sustainability in order to use it in luxury branding strategies.