Brand study of Louis Vuitton

Résumé du document

Asian market is a very good opportunity since the Chinese market today is the third one in terms of luxury (12% of sales), behind Japan (41% of sales) and the USA (17%). What is more, Indians doubled their buying power between 1999 and 2003.

Another point that needs to be explained in the SWOT is the difficulty to pronounce the name « Louis Vuitton ». The brand image is above all a strategy issue. Some brands make the choice to highlight on purpose their French characteristics. Louis Vuitton is one of these companies who wish to take advantage of their French origin and who thus, try to emphasize their nationality through a phonetic senseless translation. Therefore, "lù yì wēi dēng" will rarely appear in the press thus favoring its French appellation Louis Vuitton.

Buying a French product, the Chinese consumer buys a part of his dream. French brands benefit from a valuable image towards the Chinese consumers. However, they need to go further in order to avoid undesirable French stereotypes. Louis Vuitton benefits from a very sophisticated image, very top-of-the-range image. Its communication strategy targets a very small segment of the Chinese society, which fuels the desire to acquire such a product among a larger Chinese population seeking a certain social economic status.

Extraits

[...] We had 150 answers but we are aware of an error in our study becoming from our sample. Actually, the majority of answers come from students and they are not the core target of Louis Vuitton, they can not afford a LV's product. Furthermore of the answers come from French. More females answered to this survey than males. Brand awareness In spontaneous brand awareness, Louis Vuitton is the most named. In assisted brand awareness, Louis Vuitton, like two other competitors, obtains a score of 96,70%. [...]

[...] That is why LV has two kinds of communication. Moreover, how to conclude a Louis Vuitton file without talking about counterfeiting? We only can make a recommendation about that (indeed, communication of LV seems to be perfect) because we noticed that fake, copy and counterfeit are recurrent in our study. Some people closely associate LV and copy and this represents a serious issue for the brand. As a response to that, Louis Vuitton has adopted a zero tolerance policy against counterfeiting. [...]

[...] With a renewed increase in sales, Louis Vuitton reinforces its position of leader and keeps recording an extraordinary payoff. Innovation is certainly one of the key to these statistics as it arouses the passion from people all over the world. This performance, in such an unfavorable monetary environment, is even more remarkable. Bernard Arnault, the CEO at LVMH, said: first semester's results illustrate once again the exceptional drawing power from our brands and the efficiency of our strategy, even more noteworthy in the economical and monetary environment in this beginning of year”. [...]

[...] - They want to innovate now. “Always leading the avant-garde of fashion without compromising traditional craftsmanship of luxury leather goods” (www.louisvuitton.com). Sometimes, the brand can be perceived (and we've noticed this through our brand associations interviews we lead) as old- fashioned. The Monogram pattern has been known for decades (the design appeared in the 50's!) and time has come to change. [Notice that the Cherry Monogram pattern was designed by the Japanese artist Takashi Murakami in 2005 so as to please their Japanese target market]. [...]

[...] To cut a long story short, Louis Vuitton took a big risk in offering to sell its merchandise online. Indeed, the risk was to damage the brand image or the prestige, to reduce the aspect of exclusivity of the access to the brand, as well as to facilitate the counterfeiting. But as of now, it seems to have worked very well as they are globalizing this distribution strategy. Promotion Advertising budget: 196 millions US dollars in 2001. Communication Strategy Louis Vuitton's communication strategy changed in February 2008. [...]