New Rules of Luxury: Passports Don’t Matter Anymore


Skift Take

The industry’s old geography-first segmentation model is breaking down as high-spending travelers increasingly share tastes and expectations shaped by global peer groups.

Series: On Experience

On Experience

Colin Nagy is a marketing strategist and writes on customer-centric experiences and innovation across the luxury sector, hotels, aviation, and beyond. You can read all of his writing here.

Two 24-year-old French tourists walk into Louis Vuitton's Fifth Avenue flagship store, drawn by a colorful sculpture of a monogrammed giraffe. They browse and leave without buying. The bold logos strike them as passé.

"I think they failed to keep the luxury image," one tells Reuters. "They need to create something new, original."

A decade ago, we would have explained the luxury shopper by their nationality. Chinese shoppers associated luxury with conspicuousness, Americans with exclusivity, Europeans with craftsmanship, according to a 2013 study cited in a recent Bloomberg column.  

Consulting decks built elaborate taxonomies around geographic distinctions, such as developed versus developing markets, and considered the "emotional" versus "status" dimensions of luxury.