Our series on the key shifts happening in everyday luxury concludes with our recommendations:
Everyday Luxury: Recommendations for luxury brands
If you’re a regular Canopy blog reader, you’ll have seen that over the last month, we’ve been putting out our insights about shifts in the changing meaning of everyday luxury. Some of them feel like surprising reversals, while others are more subtle developments.
We’ve highlighted them because we think they’re useful in thinking about the future of brand and consumer relationships with luxury – how people in the near-future will know something is extraordinary and valuable.
In summary, here’s how we see everyday luxury going into 2020:
· Everyday luxury sets you free from adulthood. In a stressful world, luxury means the freedom to let go of inhibitions, to be creative and joyful without worrying about process or standards. Maximalist fashion and furnishings, psychedelic entertainment, and products and experiences that prompt the user’s creativity, provide both small, pleasurable surprises and the liberating sensation of a fantasy world.
· Everyday luxury isn’t static. For a middle class whose lives are increasingly unstable, and a world which changes quickly, time-honoured perfection just doesn’t feel that relevant. After all, perfection is easy to copy – once that perfect hotel view is Instagrammed, it’s not going to feel as special to people encountering it in real life for the first time. Instead, innovations like global co-working/co-living memberships, experiences using light and sound to constantly change, and responsive automation in hotel rooms offer luxury that fits in with the user’s life, rather than asking them to fit into the brand.
· Everyday luxury is social. We live in an era where ‘connection’ is often feted as a centrally-important moral good – and where it’s too often defined as a superficial ability to broadcast and be broadcast to other people’s smartphones. Real feelings of connection don’t have to be about information-sharing. Instead, customers experience the added value of social connection in planes designed to make socialising more comfortable, clothes brands that also let them support their wider communities, and concern-based grocery memberships.
One of the most exciting things about cultural analysis is that culture never stops changing. We’re looking forward to tracking – and helping clients respond to – the cultural changes going on throughout 2020, in diverse cultures across the globe.
Before the end of 2019, we’ll be putting out some more key shifts as we see them on topics ranging from naturalness to gaming – watch this space (and our social media) for more.
