Unpacking Four Key Strategies That Promise to Keep Communication and Creativity Alive After a Challenging Year for Luxury
By Mark Wittmer
As we look back at 2024 – a year of seismic shifts in the luxury marketing landscape – it’s clear that the ability to meet shifting consumer needs with both artistry and innovation played a crucial role in navigating the challenges and capitalizing on opportunities within the industry. The year’s most successful brands were their own most powerful advocates, adopting a 360º approach to maximize consumer engagement through an experience-driven web of activations that extended across physical and digital worlds.
Furthermore, the adaptation of marketing tactics to cater to shorter consumer attention spans and the strategic use of celebrity partnerships highlighted the industry’s response to evolving consumer preferences. The integration of AI in marketing not only showcased a blend of technology and creativity but also set new precedents for future campaigns. As fashion prepares to move into 2025, we take a look back and explore the key trends and strategies that have defined the past year in marketing communication, offering crucial insights into how luxury brands can continue to thrive in changing market conditions.
Index
- 360º Thinking: Maximizing Engagement Touchpoints
- Marketing Morsels
- A New Kind of Celebrity Partnership
- AI-Augmented Creativity
360º Thinking: Maximizing Engagement Touchpoints
Since the beginning of the “decline of traditional media,” brands have had to step up and tell their own stories, to connect directly with consumers and champion their vision in as many ways as possible. 2024 saw this key strategy reach new heights: from immersive phygital activations and new experiments in collaboration to artful retail spaces emerging as the ultimate expression of a brand identity, the brands that communicated the most successfully were often the ones taking a holistic, comprehensive approach to multichannel communication.
Tory Burch’s collaboration with photographer Walter Schels established a blueprint for a comprehensive marketing push across all communication touchpoints. After first teasing the playful collaboration (which featured prints with the photographer’s signature animal portraits) via her Resort 2024 presentation, the designer further leveraged the launch with a digital campaign starring Maude Apatow, a party at her New York boutique featuring high-profile friends of the brand, and pop-up activations at Paris, L.A., and New York stores. From beginning to end, the project masterfully leveraged a single design concept into an extended brand narrative, driving engagement and creating experiences across multiple digital and physical channels.
While Bottega Veneta still technically has no social media presence of its own, the brand nonetheless continues to make waves through strategic cultural engagements. This year saw Bottega extend its partnership with the iconic and recently revitalized BUTT magazine, celebrate beloved illustrator Richard Scarry, launch furniture collaborations with Cassina and Flos, name it-boy Jacob Elordi as brand ambassador, and activate the fourth edition of its Bottega for Bottegas project spotlighting small-scale Venetian artisans. The brand also continues to put out new editions of its fanzine, which brings its creative world together into beautiful physical editions.
Other major moments that embodied this 360º thinking included Prada’s Fall campaign with an interactive hotline hosted by author Miranda July, Gentle Monster’s collaboration with the hugely popular video game Tekken 8 that featured both in-game and IRL designs and a massive pop-up, and Marc Jacobs’ collaboration series in celebration of his 40th anniversary, which featured special capsules and accompanying campaigns and activations.
Marketing Morsels
But while this expansive and multifaceted approach to driving interaction and branded storytelling in the medium- and long-term, within this framework is a need to harness the breakneck space of contemporary digital communication. With modern attention spans shorter than ever, the days of minute-long video ads are fading fast. Over a quarter of viewers abandon videos after just 10 seconds. To counteract this, luxury brands are crafting ultra-brief yet compelling narratives designed to captivate instantly – often strategically leveraging existing assets into bite-sized moments of connection.
Burberry and Miu Miu have both exemplified this approach. Drawing from its gorgeous, setting and character-focused campaigns, Burberry edits this imagery into the kind of short, vertically oriented video clips that thrive on TikTok and Instagram reels. Miu Miu, meanwhile, embraces TikTok’s spontaneous, user-generated aesthetic, sharing cheeky outtakes from its campaign shoots, runway shows, and cultural activations.
A New Kind of Celebrity Partnership
Celebrity endorsements are nothing new, but the new year is set to see the continued rise of a new kind of creative exchange. These partnerships didn’t just draw on the popularity and reach of their stars; they tapped into cultural movements and created mutually beneficial relationships with talents that can be seen as both unique individuals and brands of their own.
Most emblematic of this trend was Charli XCX and Brat Summer. Already a star, the singer harnessed the zeitgeist and rocketed to the forefront of cultural conversation, creating a vision of liberated feminine individuality and retro-rave-inspired style that swept the world. Brands were quick to catch on: Charli starred in campaigns for Acne Studios and Skims, launched a collaborative collection with H&M, and repped a range of designers on her Sweat tour with Troye Sivan – each stop of which featured a new outfit, a new email in every fashion editor’s inbox, and a big social-media boost for the brand she was wearing.
A significant impact was felt across retail and resale as well. Ahead of the album’s release, resell platform StockX found that there were nearly 30,000 searches for “Rave” on the site and that the Jordan 1 Retro High OG Green Glow – which boasts a brat-coded color palette – had nearly 5,000 trades and made more than a half million dollars this year alone.
But the summer wasn’t just about lime green, miniskirts, and club beats. The Paris Olympics exponentially accelerated the growing intersection between fashion and sports, with athletes entering the spotlight like never before. Olympians like gymnast Suni Lee and Algerian boxing champ Imane Khelif sat front row, while some – like sprinter Noah Lyles and fencer Miles Chamley-Watson – walked the runway.
While Louis Vuitton definitely made the most of its role as the Games’ official premium partner, other brands launched smart campaigns that tapped into the athleticism and achievement of the event. Foremost among these was Jacquemus, which celebrated its latest collaboration with Nike with a dynamically produced short film featuring both Olympians and fashion personalities taking over Paris.
AI-Augmented Creativity
This wasn’t the first year we saw campaigns created using generative artificial intelligence, but it was the first year that it felt like they truly came into their own and gave us a glimpse of just how powerful AI can be to realize a human creative vision.
That aspect of blending a consistent human touch with the new application of technology is what made CDLP’s surreally luxurious holiday campaign so successful. At once effortless yet clever, the vast majority of the Swedish under and essentials brand’s campaigns are shot and produced by its co-founder and creative director Christian Larson and feature his friends and creative community, extending a sense of personal touch and carefully considered creative cohesion. By using generative AI technology to build off of this human foundation rather than radically departing from it, the brand maintains its signature visual perspective while reaping many of the benefits of an AI campaign.
And those benefits are many, from potentially spending a fraction of the cost of an IRL campaign with human models to faster turnover time as the logistical prep and editing processes are streamlined and centralized. But those cost-saving benefits would feel cold, calculated, and inhuman if real creativity didn’t remain a central aspect of the final image.
Earlier in the year, Etro shared an AI-powered campaign that, though some of the warmth and visual specificity we would have liked to see got lost in the digital dreamscape, offered another promising window into effective use of the technology and a reminder of just how quickly it is advancing.
Key Takeaways
As brands both take on a greater responsibility to champion their own narratives and feel the effects of a year that was for many characterized by a stagnant luxury market, communication strategies that embrace multiplicity, clarity, and a look to the future of connectivity have taken center stage. The art of crafting micro-moments of connection has become critical in seizing consumer curiosity and loyalty, proving indispensable in an era of fleeting digital attention spans. Meanwhile, the reinvention of celebrity partnerships showcases a lucrative path forward, where influence is interwoven with authenticity, amplifying both personal and commercial brands. Amidst this, the rise of AI in creative spheres underscores a future ripe with potential, where technology extends the reach and efficiency of human creativity without overshadowing it.