Luxury brands should focus on ‘imperfection’, according to industry experts

A panel of industry experts has encouraged luxury travel brands to be more “authentic and genuine” with their marketing campaigns.

 

Speaking at Aspire’s Leaders of Luxury conference at The Peninsula London yesterday (June 22), bosses from a range of travel brands agreed that luxury doesn’t have to equal perfection.

 

Divia Thani, global editorial director at Condé Nast Traveller, said: “What is going to make someone look at an amazing piece of content and then book [with that brand]?

 

“I think it has to be authentic, and it’s got to be rooted in something that’s true. There should also be a little bit of something that’s raw – it’s not perfect and it doesn’t necessarily feel like luxury, but it feels real.”

 

Jules Perowne, founder and chief executive of PR firm Perowne International, agreed that brands should focus less on conveying luxury, as luxury has become an “intensely ugly word”.

 

She said: “We’ve lost our confidence in luxury because it’s too polished, it’s too perfect and it’s lost its craftmanship, its meaning and its integrity.”

 

She added that Perowne International works with clients to tell their stories in “the right way”, which “doesn’t feel fake and doesn’t look like everybody else”.

 

To ensure it’s creating content that is authentic, Peter Chipchase, chief brand officer at Abercrombie & Kent Travel Group (AKTG), said the operator is “empowering guides to become our content creators”.

 

He said: “We’ve invested a lot of money into going out and shooting our own content, which we own and we can communicate across all of our different brands.

 

“We’re getting into the detail of what makes these individual trips special, but if we’re going out and shooting something for two weeks, there’s moments you might miss during that time.”

 

By having its guides double up as content creators, AKTG hopes to showcase every aspect of what it’s like to travel with the group, with content “feeding in all the time” to be used across its social media platforms and entire digital ecosystem.

 

Highlighting what is special about travelling with a certain brand is an approach Uwern Jong, experientialist-in-chief at OutThere, also believes to be beneficial.

 

“We’ve become very self-absorbed as an industry,” he said. “We talk about us all the time – our pools, sunsets, facilities – but we don’t talk about the benefits.

 

“People want to know what the benefits are of traveling with a particular provider, and I don’t think we’re doing enough of that.”

 

He encouraged brands to focus less on their facilities and more on “what the emotion is that I’m going to feel when I’m staying with you, or while I’m on your ship, or while I’m in your destination”.

 

Anna Nash, president of Explora Journeys, also highlighted the importance of establishing a strong brand story that’s separate from facts and figures.

 

She said: “What’s really interesting is that there wasn’t an [Explora Journeys] ship that then needed a story – it was the story that came first.

 

“There was a natural authenticity about how we came to life, as we knew we had to go to market very quickly, so the story was there [when we launched].”

 

She said it is “incredibly important” to have a story, and Explora Journeys uses its story to showcase cruising through “a different lens and a different narrative”, which has contributed to the line’s success.