BBC Culture interview on The Future Of Luxury in the post-COVID world with Dr. Martina Olbertova

In anticipation of the Luxes exhibition opening at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris in October, I was interviewed by Cath Pound for a BBC Culture article about where the future of luxury is headed in the post-pandemic world, what people deem luxurious today and how is today's meaning of luxury changing across the world in light of the COVID pandemic.

What is a ‘life of luxury’ now? ––– Head to BBC Culture to read Cath's piece.

Take a look below at our full interview:

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BBC Culture: Were ideas around luxury changing even before COVID – especially in regard to the environmental cost of overconsumption and travel?

Yes, they were. That's why I wrote The Luxury Report on Redefining The Future Meaning Of Luxury last year, to help bring the luxury industry's attention to the fact that the fundamental meaning of luxury – the very symbolic foundation on which this segment had been built – is changing, and therefore all else has to change along with it. Otherwise, luxury brands won't be relevant, won't be able to encapsulate their meaning and offer real value to their customers in the context of the world, quickly evolving society and culture.

It's this invisible net of signification, culture and meaning that decides if brands and products will be successful or not. The actual physical products are just manifestations of what is going through culture a long time before they hit the shelves at retail stores.

In this report, I identified 5 key cultural shifts that are eroding and disintegrating the traditional meaning of luxury:

1. EMPOWERING NEW IDENTITIES

From Selling Luxury Goods To Empowering New Customers' Identities And Lifestyles

Consumer habits are undergoing a rapid change today as the new generation of consumers focuses on expressing their own individuality rather than ownership. The consumption of luxury is becoming less and less about the luxury brands themselves and more about empowering people to become more of who they are. This shift pushes luxury brands to be the active agents in their customers’ identity creation, which goes far beyond the traditional limits of luxury branding. It reverses the industry dynamic from aspiring to own brands to empowering people and their individual identities.

2. PERSONALISED EXPERIENCES

From Personal Luxury To Designing Personalised Experiences

We are moving away from the tangible aspects of personal luxury to the intangibles –– the unique and personalised experiences that have the potential to better and transform our lives. Today, globalisation and mass production mean that more people can afford to own more things than ever before. But the more we can buy, the less it means to us. The new generation is in the active search for meaning. These savvy consumers came to adulthood in the world of ’sharing economy’, where direct access to utility overtakes the idea of aspirational ownership. The unaffordability of the traditional big milestones of adult life further shifts our focus towards experiencing the most in the here and now.

3. THE LUXURY ESSENTIALISM

From Excess, Rarity And Opulence To The Everyday Luxury Essentialism

Luxury used to be reserved for ‘best.’ Rare and special things, treated with awe and kept carefully aside for special occasions. But a rising tide of affluence, combined with the rise of ‘always-on’ social media and 24-hour internet shopping, means that our access to luxury has become more democratised. The result is that more of us desire luxury to be a part of our daily lives, especially as the meaning of luxury diversifies. In the age of market oversaturation, the new savvy consumers are becoming more of shopping connoisseurs as they look for premium quality to meet and satisfy their own essential needs. To become essential, luxury brands need to create meaningful value in people’s lives.

4. NEW FORMS OF RELEVANCE

From Cultural Heritage And Legacy To Seeking New Forms Of Relevance

Around the world, people are less and less willing to respect established brands and institutions just because they have a long-standing legacy. The past is no longer here. The key to the heart of a new luxury consumer is personal relevance. In today’s world, no brand has an eternal right to claim its luxury status, which is why no brand can afford to rest on its laurels. To be relevant today, every luxury brand must constantly look for new and refreshing ways to contextualise the old within the new. Luxury brands need to bring the story of their heritage, craft and legacy within the cultural context of today to appeal to the new generation of customers.

5. CATALYSTS OF CULTURE CHANGE

From Luxury Consumption To Becoming The Catalysts Of Culture Change

We live in a world where we create who we are. We use our choice of brands as the markers and signifiers of identities we create for ourselves. Successful luxury brands are realising that by advocating for social and cultural values their customers care about, they can grow their business organically while also remaining authentic to their inner essence. Meanwhile, some of the biggest recent luxury disasters have arisen because brands have misjudged their cultural expressions, which is why it takes a trained cultural perspective to translate such strategies into a meaningful brand and business value.

Download The Luxury Report: Redefining The Future Meaning Of Luxury here.

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But, the COVID pandemic greatly catalysed the situation and helped speed up the transition of the luxury industry towards these new trends much faster than it would be able to do otherwise. The new macro trends we are seeing now in reaction to the pandemic are much more connected to healing, well-being, wellness, seclusion, privacy, disconnecting to connect back to our human essence and back to nature and the natural rhythm of life, and the need for meaningful experiences, all of which are currently on the rise across the world.

As we are venturing from the oversaturation of the material world (the tangibles) towards the more intangible things (moments, feelings and experiences), the ratio shifts very rapidly and significantly.

The new luxury goes beyond the old traditional perception of luxury for two reasons. Firstly, because of scarcity – different things are scarce now than they were in the past (such as time, clean air, space, inner peace, mindfulness, human touch, meaningful connections), and secondly, luxury is becoming greatly diversified as we are realizing now that different parts of our innate needs are not being met. This opens up a whole pool of new opportunities for the luxury brands to tap into that wasn't available to them in the past.

In this sense, COVID offers a great opportunity to the luxury brands and the business world, in general, to pause, reflect and do the inner alignment work in order to create more meaningful and essential value in people's everyday lives.

The conversation on the new luxury is increasingly becoming about concepts such as transcending the here and now, coming back to self, self-actualization, connecting to our human essence, coming back to mother nature, re-contextualisation (embracing ourselves in context of the world we live in, as a part of both the natural and cultural environment) and the new luxury essentialism.

BBC Culture: In what way has COVID exacerbated those trends?

The need to come back to ourselves and our own inner essence – this has become an urgent priority this year. To stop, take a pause and understand who we are. To disconnect in order to connect back to ourselves. Recalibrate, reprioritise, replenish our energy, rebalance our lives. Understand who we are, why we're here, become more conscious, purposeful and authentic in our existence.

BBC Culture: There has been an increasing trend towards experiences with meaning, especially in regards to travel. What will luxury consumers be looking for post-pandemic?

On the last episode of The Luxury Renaissance Show which we just started with Angela Tunner, Publisher of EAT LOVE SAVOR luxury lifestyle magazine, we had a wonderful guest Luca Franco, Founder and CEO of Luxury Frontiers, who talked to us about going beyond luxury and the future of meaningful experiences: authentic, transformative and transcendental experiences, rewilding, cultural immersion and meaningful travel.

The segment of travel luxury will go towards privacy, seclusion, glamping, private experiences, wellness and luxury resorts, exclusivity, safety, remoteness, coming back to roots, but also increasingly towards rewilding, recalibrating our energies and rebalancing our relationship with mother nature and with earth to understand that we are nature.

Based on the Google Trends research from this summer, the searches for cottages went up 190%, Glamping was up 180%, Wellness and Resorts were up 65% and 50% respectively. This shows people are now looking to get away to places that are allowing them to distance safely and have a truly luxurious experience in remote, private and secluded settings to get centred and regain a peace of mind amidst a global world full of chaos.

BBC Culture: Consumption is increasingly about identity – but when that identity is becoming less materialistic how are luxury brands going to reconcile that with a need to make profit?

We need to look into new ways on how to create meaningful consumption. We are not going back to the old model of consumption, so brands and businesses need to evolve their thinking and shift their mindset to offer real value that people truly care about, that matters to them, and adds value and meaning to their lives. People consume meaning – the symbolic value behind brands and products – that is the cornerstone of value exchange.

The old consumption model was driven by the lack mentality. Buy this to alleviate this pain or clear out this problem, our brand is the response and a solution to your need. Brands acted as an injection to our low self-esteem. That is no longer something we care about. Brands shouldn't exploit our weaknesses, but rather help us build on our strengths. The lower basic needs are still important for functionality and utility, but brands are businesses need to find a way to satisfy our higher needs. The needs for self-expression, self-actualisation, and act as a vehicle to help us creatively express our own identity and our own voice, act as social platforms and agents of cultural change to help people unlock and reach their full potential.

We need to shift our perspective from lack toward the abundance mindset. And luxury brands as the crafters of superior value should lead the way. The new consumption is based on experience, coming back to ourselves and on building relationships. This is helping us belong, be and use things that reinforce the relationship with ourselves and with others.

BBC Culture: In your materials, the idea of simplicity was mentioned – that we need less to experience more. A return to ‘quality over quantity’ would, of course, be wonderful in environmental terms but how can that be reconciled with luxury brands’ need to make us buy more, especially in terms of fashion? 

This reconciliation isn't difficult in the abstract sense, but requires a mindset shift to turn it into reality: We need to return to things filled with meaning. Things of essential value that add meaning to our lives. Out of the disposable culture towards the culture of value. We were there in the past, luxury was about crafting superior value, it was out of the ordinary. Right now, out of the ordinary are things that were plentiful in the past – time, clean air, wellness, well-being, remoteness, privacy, seclusion, sunlight, calmness and inner peace, mindfulness. So the luxury sector, but also the rest of the business world, needs to align and help us come back into balance. That is where the real value is for us as human beings.

We are not going back to the old world. The old normal is gone. The new normal is not quite here yet. This year, in 2020, we have entered the time of Great Change. We need to take a big leap forward into the unknown and centre our thinking and businesses around the fundamental value they add to the lives of other people for their own wellbeing. This will be the challenge of the upcoming times, but also a great opportunity.

Luxury brands don't need to make us buy more. You only stimulate more products and more sales when you don't know where your value is. When you have forgotten your own roots and what you mean to people – what your place is in their lives. The mantra of more is better in terms of economic success will come to a steep decline.

Luxury brands need to understand what their meaning is in people's lives and how to add value to their customers. There are ways to do that through long-lasting quality and not quantity, and those are the more sustainable ones, economically and consumption wise.

BBC Culture: Luxury was never supposed to be about status but about meaning. How can brands return to that idea in a post-pandemic world?

Brands need to understand their essence and how it translates to people's needs today: what value they add to people's lives, where their place is and why they matter. Then this meaning will translate into people's feelings and the need for identity, creative expression and the sense of belonging. It has really never worked any other way. The most successful brands have always done that, be it Apple, Nike, Harley Davidson, Ralph Lauren or Patagonia.

The meaning is what can create this status – as in the aura of exclusivity and symbolism around a brand – but blindly aiming at status acquisition makes brands hollow and meaningless. Which then makes them prone to volatility and loss of value in the market.

We could see this decline in meaning and value clearly with Zac Posen and the House of Z last year, and now also with the deal of Tiffany and LVMH that now fell through. If you stop meaning what you meant in the past to people, you will become obsolete and this symbolic insignificance and irrelevance will hurt you financially, and then existentially as a brand.

BBC Culture: On your new show, you talk about ‘a luxury lifestyle beyond acquisition where luxury is a state of mind and approach to living.’ What does that state of mind and approach entail? 

The luxury lifestyle or 'lived luxury' ethos is a part of the foundational blocks of The Luxury Renaissance Show that we've created. It focuses on rediscovering and retrieving the cultural knowledge and cultural context behind luxury that were lost by over-exposing luxury to the mass market which has led to the democratization of luxury, on one hand, but on the other hand, also to its gradual meaninglessness as it became a social symbol of status acquisition.

We are aiming to bridge this divide in perception of luxury and re-create the cultural meaning of luxury in the context of real lived values (as a lifestyle) as opposed to status acquisition (buying something that is not authentic or lived on a deep meaningful level).

With the Aristocracy versus Meritocracy divide and the complete de-contextualistion of luxury in the 1980s when luxury became all about purchasing expensive things to gain a competitive advantage in the world, all about the surface value, but not about the inherent value, came the loss of meaning in the luxury sector. We could buy more, but it meant less.

We are now taking the route we didn't take in the past for luxury to mean something again. We want to re-introduce this lost cultural component into the luxury conversation to properly understand the cultural value of luxury: what is behind it, the longevity aspect, how to properly care for luxury items, how to use them in your own everyday life to elevate it and make it more beautiful and enjoyable. It's not about what impression you leave on others, but about how you feel about yourself inside. And we need to come back to that.

Luxury is only true luxury if it's imbued with meaning and understood in the cultural context – this is where the meaning comes from. And from that meaning comes the symbolic value which is the primary value of a luxury brand. If the shared cultural context isn't there, if it's disposable or easily replicable, or if it doesn't have the symbolic aura of meaning, feeling, uniqueness and sensory aesthetics around it, it is not true luxury.

So, the key point for the luxury brands to focus on now is how to bring this symbolic universe back into your brand – to understand what your brand means in the real lived cultural context of people, your own customers, and how to translate this meaning into an actual marketable value that people will buy. Which is quite fittingly exactly what I do and why I founded Meaning.Global – to help brands understand, navigate and embody this symbolic meaning to maximise their relevance, equity and essential value in the market. 

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ABOUT DR. MARTINA OLBERTOVA

Dr. Martina Olbertova is the world’s leading expert on creating meaning and cultural relevance in business. She is a speaker, writer, brand advisor, cultural strategist, social scientist and semiotician on a mission to redefine the role of meaning in the industry, teaching organisations how to create meaning to encapsulate value from the inside out.

Martina is the Founder and CEO of Meaning.Global, a global strategy & cultural intelligence consultancy helping brands and businesses navigate the shifting symbolic meanings in global culture and adapt to the fast-changing context of our world today to profit from culture change and create new value and relevance.

She is advising brands and organisations on how to maximize value creation and meaningful growth from the point of view of where the businesses, culture and society are going in the 21st century. She helps brand and business leaders be more culturally savvy and create authentic meaning to connect with their customers around moments that truly matter.

Martina is a contributor to Branding Strategy Insider, a commentator for Forbes, Luxury Daily, Luxury Society, Eat Love Savor Luxury Lifestyle magazine, author of The Luxury Report: Redefining The Future Meaning Of Luxury and the creator and host of The Luxury Renaissance Show. She holds a doctorate in Media Studies from Charles University in Prague, and regularly consults, teaches and speaks at conferences around the world. 

Contact Martina directly: [email protected] | www.meaning.global

Follow Martina on LinkedIn | Twitter | Medium | SlideShare | YouTube

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ABOUT MEANING.GLOBAL

Meaning.Global was founded in 2017 as a direct reaction to the ongoing meaning crisis in the industry, caused by the increasing speed and scale of change, global cultural complexity, industry fragmentation and technological disruption over the past decade.

We are helping brands and businesses adapt to the shifting cultural context of the 21st century to create meaning, cultural relevance and new value in these rapidly changing times. We partner with brands and businesses to come back to their true meaning and core essence to deliver real value in people’s lives.

The new meaningful strategy lies at the intersection where the two worlds collide: where the brand and business essence meet the human essence. We are connecting these two worlds to help business leaders bridge the meaning and value disconnects between what brands say and do and what people actually value to create authentic and valuable connections between brands and people. 

Our aim is to help brands and businesses understand the destabilising social and cultural foundations of the world we live in and equip leaders with the hidden knowledge of culture to inform more meaningful and profitable future strategies.

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