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Top1. New Marketing Trends In Consumer Markets: Can Luxury Brands Be Sustainable?
Sustainable development is on the global agenda. Intensive demographic and economic growth without ecological concerns jeopardizes the life of next generations. Governments, NGO’s and consumers are asking all economic sectors to change fast. Luxury has recently been a target for public criticism: it would be lagging, if not at odds with sustainable development imperatives. Focusing on specific products and consumers, critics point at the waste of resources for the pleasure of a happy few. Luxury attracts special attention in the areas of ecology, sustainable development and social equity (Kassaye, 2001). A deeper analysis reveals how much sustainable development is deeply congenial with luxury, but real luxury: both take rarity as their central concern and real luxury is by definition durable. Certainly luxury highlights the inequality of society, but it does not create it. Acting as a paragon of quality, luxury will need to act as a model in sustainability. Major real luxury brands have already responded to the demands of sustainability, but without much communicating, (Janssen et al., 2013). Can luxury brands be at the leading edge of sustainability? Much remains to be done. Finally is a luxury strategy the most efficient way to foster ecological behaviors?
Luxury is under pressure of sustainable development. Sustainable development has become the major collective challenge for many countries on our planet. Although not all of them signed the Kyoto Agreement, most of them expressed concern about the limits of our natural resources, the need to find a new type of economic growth while taking into account the costs of its collective negative fallouts, which is so far unmeasured, and will have an impact on future generations.
Key Terms in this Chapter
E-Commerce: Any form of transaction or exchange of information for commercial purposes in which the parties interact using Information and Communications Technology (ICT). That is, the distribution, sale, marketing and delivering of information about products or services over the Internet.
Social media: Applications, platforms and online communication tools that facilitate the relationship, interaction, collaboration and content generation and distribution between users.
Marketing 3.0: It is the marketing orientation that focuses on providing value and additional benefits in the society in which it operates.
Web 2.0: Also called the social Web, it is a set of applications and tools that allow users to navigate and interact dynamically with information, share content, socialize opinions, bring in the construction of collective learning etc.
Luxury Goods: Products which are not necessary but which tend to make life more pleasant for the consumer. In contrast with necessity goods, luxury goods are typically more costly and are often bought by individuals that have a higher disposable income or greater accumulate wealth and average.