Help Please?

[asupersonicboy]

Hello. I am at university in Coventry, England. I am researching the topic of luxury for my final year project and have created a quick questionnaire for my research. If you could find the time to fill it in I would be most grateful.

Plese click on the link below to access the questionnaire. If you have any other questions or would like to offer further assistance in my project then please email [email protected]

here is the link

http://www.my3q.com/home2/24/asupers...y/luxury.phtml

Many thanks

Andi Grant

[crayzayjay]

I've moved this thread to its appropriate place. Lots of people will be able to see it here and hopefully take your survey.

Im a financial analyst for some luxury goods companies so if you want to pm me some questions go right ahead. Here's a good article that was in the FT a few weeks ago. It's about whether luxury brands can be discounted without compromising their desirability. Hope it helps

Discounted luxury is an oxymoron. When so called "exclusive" brands sell lines off cheaply, it is often to the detriment of their carefully honed image. Woe betide the brand owner that off-loads excess product at the end of the season without giving its positioning due consideration. As Tyler Brûlé, founder of the style bible Wallpaper, puts it, heavy discounting can play havoc with a brand's reputation if it is "embraced by the wrong suburbs".
Lacoste learnt the pitfalls of discounting on the high street to its cost in the US. Selling off merchandise cheaply seemed to be the answer to having produced too much to sell at the original price. But when wealthy consumers saw their chauffeur sporting the alligator marque, "the brand lost cachet and had to be withdrawn", says Nirmalya Kumar, professor of marketing at London Business School. Lacoste has since been reintroduced to the US market.
"When you discount a brand on a frequent basis without a good reason, such as end of season, that cheapens the brand," says Mr Kumar.
Luxury is all about exclusivity. Once a brand becomes attainable, it is in trouble. A lot of luxury brand companies are posting losses because of just that, says Nic Hall, director of consumer understanding at Research International. "My definition of luxury is unattainable, or attainable only with a great deal of effort."
A Gucci key-ring is within the budget of many people and Mr Hall accuses Gucci, along with Chanel and Christian Dior, of downgrading itself.
Many brands have used the factory outlet to off-load end-of-line products, though that environment can seem unglamorous - one step up from a service station.
But there is another way. Outside Lugano sits the shopping mall Foxtown, where luxury rubs shoulders with more luxury. This environment seems to work for both the brands and their customers. "Gucci and Prada and Ralph Lauren are all together and they love it," says Mr Brûlé, now CEO of creative agency Winkreative.
It works for the brands as they are far enough removed from their expensive central outlets, where they are on sale at full price, and they appreciate the safety in numbers. A sale can also be endowed with a bit of status. Many stores put on "invitation only" sales as a way of treating their best customers and press contacts.
"Private sales act as a filter," says Sam Grange, associate director at Added Value, Paris. He cites the luxury chain L'Eclaireur, which gets shot of its unwanted Dolce & Gabbana, Issey Miyake and Comme des Garçons in this way.
This is a controlled environment, adding (perceived) value to the experience of buying at a low price. Can luxury retailers pull the same trick at a virtual mall? The order books of Yoox seem to show there is considerable appetite on the Internet for cheap chic, albeit old chic.
Yoox was set up three years ago in Italy by Federico Marchetti, its chief executive, previously in mergers and acquisitions and luxury goods with Lehman Brothers. Its model is straightforward: take last season's clothes and accessories from 300 exclusive brands and sell them online at a massive discount.
The company sells to more than 15 European countries and was launched in the US last autumn. Despite having little marketing support, this is now Yoox's fastest-growing market, already representing 10 per cent of its monthly turnover. It hit break-even in the fourth quarter of 2002 and turnover doubled to €10m (£7m) in the first six months of 2003. Recently, it secured a further €6.5m investment from Benchmark Capital, the global venture capital firm behind e-commerce operators eBay, Betfair and eBags.
Mr Marchetti believes he avoids the most damaging discounting pitfalls through a combination of choice of medium, stylish presentation and careful selection of merchandise. As a cheaper, online-only offer, it is distancing itself from the value-added boutique experience and appealing to a different audience. These younger, less well off consumers - two-thirds of them under 29 years old - are being introduced to luxury brands. The website has had more than 7m visitors and more than 70,000 orders, 70 per cent from repeat business.
All this means that the brands featured on Yoox are benefiting almost as much as its customers. Costume National's designs are stocked in Barneys and Harrods as well as on Yoox.
Antonio Padula, Costume International's general manager, is relaxed about this method of appearing online: "The Yoox channel is not competitive with our traditional channels. It accounts for less than 3 per cent of our sales, and anyway it's the previous year's lines."
Although it is discounted, Yoox keeps its end up in terms of quality of experience. The website is stylish and does not scream discount, the pieces are carefully selected by Marchetti and delivery is in line with the luxuriousness of the purchase. "The internet is the perfect medium," says Mr Marchetti, "allowing the purchase to arrive from the sky in a beautiful box."

[freakray]

Actually Jay, considering he posted the survey in 9 different forums, I should think it would fall into the category of SPAM.

[crayzayjay]

He posted in 9 different forums!!! tsk tsk.. i have a lot of deleting on my hands

[slave]

Done. But why does luxury need to cost anything? I've dated a couple of girl richer than most could imagine and the most luxurious times were those by a pool with a nice G&T and not when in the expensive cars or houses. Luxury is a state of mind given via said objects etc. Money can help, but not replace true feelings of luxury.

[asupersonicboy]

cheers crazyjay, that artical was very useful.

I posted on nine different forums so I can get as many replies as possible, its for a university project so I need all the replies I can get, if I knew there was one place where it would be seen the most then I would have just posted it there.

Sorry you had to delete them crazyjay/slave, but thanks for taking an interest

Andi

[taranaki]

Luxury is in the eye of the beholder.It's all relative to the circles in which you move.In Beverly Hills,A luxury home needs to be the size of a small palace,and decorated accordingly.In cambodia or the like anything that has a roof and is vermin-proof would be classed as luxurious.