News Corp Australia’s (NCA) Prestige Network consists of mastheads such as Vogue, GQ and The Australian to name a few. These have an audience of over 5.5M, attracting top advertisers across multiple categories.
While NCA had access to global luxury codes, they lacked an understanding of the Australian meaning of luxury within the business. With most luxury brands in Australia being international, their strategies are built for many different audiences resulting in a ‘one size fits all’ understanding of luxury consumers in an incredibly diverse market.
For a more nuanced understanding of the Australian luxury consumer, we applied a multi-method approach to explore what luxury expressions were resonating with different audiences.
- Cultural Insight – to build a foundational understanding of the role of luxury in culture throughout history and geographies. Current luxury trends in culture were analysed to determine residual, dominant and emergent expressions of luxury and their underlying drivers.
- Semiotics at scale – analysis of 75+ Global & Australian luxury brands across:
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- Product Categories: Fashion, Accessories, Automotive
- Experience Categories: Restaurants & Bars, Travel, Wellness
- Services Categories: Finance, Real-Estate
Through VerveAI, we analysed thousands of written and visual data points from the brands’ advertising, websites, social media content, activations and experiences as well as their overarching strategy. After a combined analysis by expert humans and AI, data points were themed into semiotic codes based on their visual cues, archetypes & Schwartz values.
- Qualitative depth interviews with 6 Australian high net worth luxury consumers across the categories to dive deeper into the meaning of luxury and life aspirations. Revealing how this translates to their values, brand preferences, purchase behaviours and key moments of truth across their shopping journey.
- Quantitative survey of luxury-consuming Australians to further expand understanding of how values and needs impacts their attraction to the luxury codes and favourite brands.
The outcome? An overarching narrative depicting the changing paradigm of luxury at a global level. 10 Luxury Codes with clarity on their unique semiotic expression, the dominant archetypes and the Schwartz values they are tied to.
All delivered in a playbook with executional detail and guardrails for luxury brands across product, service and experience, allowing the brands to successfully connect with the audience and better position their offering.