Luxury and Love

Luxury and luxury brands exert an irresistible and almost magical attraction on us, with a sense of the unique that appeals to our deepest emotional needs. A relationship? We’re in! With all our senses. Reason? Not all that important for once. A high sticker price can even make the product more desirable. In quite different ways from one person to the next. Extremely individual.

Just like love. We don’t really need love and all of its associated complications and complexities in order to survive or reproduce. We’d do perfectly fine without. Just that life wouldn’t really be as much fun. Because love is a unique and precious gift. Highly emotional, precious and absolutely priceless. Joy, happiness and meaning all rolled into one. Seen like that, love could be understood as a particularly attractive form of luxury.

Our beloved inspires us with all the best features and qualities of a brand. Like brands, the people we desire function primarily as a sociopsychological phenomenon. Value and meaning arise solely in the subjective perception of the (potential) “buyer”, and ultimately it is the “consumer” who decides on the success of the “brand”. There’s the story and the design and generally the orientation in the flood of offers. A genuine promise of quality, confidence in making the right decision and the prospect of a shared future obviously help as well. Once we have found love, we usually want to hold on to it. We aim to reduce the risk, as we do when we decide on a brand. The partner slash consumer can relax in their decision.

As with luxury brands, material values, such as an attractive design and functional utility, are obviously not the only factors that determine true love. Much more important is the overall framework that places the more intangible aspects in a seductive and compelling light. So image is important here, too. The “halo effect” then puts an even more positive spin on everything.

Love changes the way we look at our beloved – something that luxury brands also benefit from in our parallel relationship. We see things differently when we’re in love. The objective becomes blurred in favor of a highly personal, occasionally somewhat transfiguring sense of desire. The adage “love is blind” can be applied to luxury as well. And love is forgiving. It causes us to emphasize the positive.

But nothing can harm a healthy relationship anyway. Perhaps luxury brands simply speak to our nature, to our ability to love.