Developing brand equity
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played in this field by these two aspects of the marketing mix. Currently, in China, Lacoste is perceived as a prestige brand: its entry into the market is recent and was very selective regarding its points of sale. It is also main sponsor of the brand-new Shanghai Tennis Masters. Moreover, the Asian journalists who count are invited to the New York Fashion Week, where the Lacoste collections for the following year are paraded among all the great names of fashion and luxury. It is therefore necessary for the luxury brand permanently to outdo itself in terms of star products, the function of which is to remind all and sundry of its supremacy, its status among the elites, among the media that count, the sources of prestige. Whereas the world only talks about speed limits, radars, points lost from your driving licence, Porsche regularly launches a car in a limited series, or at a price that amounts to the same thing, outdoing all the competition in terms of brake horsepower, power, pure speed, etc. In this quest for the absolute, which characterizes the brand, there are no limits. This nurtures the dream and the supremacy.
Managing the dream through communication We will dedicate an entire chapter (Chapter 11) to this very important subject.
Defending the brand against counterfeiting Counterfeiting is a parasite endemic to luxury, whose economic basis is simple: as we have already seen, a luxury product has a functional side and a dream side, and the client pays for both; it is therefore possible, by counterfeiting the product, to cheat on both aspects. From the moment that the product becomes a luxury product, and therefore carries a significant weight of dreams, an enormous field opens up to counterfeiting, through the conjoined effect of two mechanisms:
• All the investment made in the dream, particularly in distribution and
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communication, often translates in visual terms as only a simple logo on the product, often particularly cheap to imitate (Chanel’s ‘double C’ on a T-shirt, or ‘LV’ on a canvas bag). By also communicating to people who are not part of its target, in order to create social stratification, a brand automatically creates an in-draught to the counterfeiting of the only obvious aspects, such as a logo, or a characteristic shape (Oyster by Rolex).