Too good to be true?

Beyond the title’s notion being true, luxury brands enjoy other characteristics that make them some of the most coveted clients for communications agencies to advise. Fashionable lifestyle media are eager to feature them because, if only we could offer images of their eye-catching and mouth-watering products, they give an element of status to the media in which their stories are featured.

Other brands (from the world of luxury and other fields) looking to promote themselves have been known to propose ‘pairings’ that strengthen both brand images, and in some cases where others suffer and/or pay to be present, these companies are invited by the prestige they bring. And there are many invitations, because there are many sporting, cultural, social, economic, and gastronomic events in which they are required to be present. In fact, the selection process to select those that will truly contribute something positive to the brand is very exhaustive.

If the status quo of an agency is to push for media publications featuring their client(s) so that they can be held in good standing at third party events, for example, the equation is reversed in the case of luxury brands. Here, agencies take on an opposite approach by filtering communications opportunities because of the status that these brands are associated with.

At least, this is what has happened at Aleph Comunicación since the team begun managing communications for Riofrío Caviar, considered one of the world’s best caviars. The Aleph team is accustomed to working with ICT accounts, usually concerning B2B and technical topics, so having a client such as Caviar de Riofrío in our portfolio – whose mere mention awakens the appetite of the speaker (be it a journalist, influencer, or consumer) – changes things a lot. One could say that the day-to-day seems more bearable.

However, this does not mean that managing a luxury account is a luxury in and of itself, but rather one that demands undivided attention. Upholding and communicating the tradition of such a brand, ensuring that they don’t become obsolete, adapting content to new media without losing ground, and being mentioned only in select media along with related brands is not an easy task.

In contrast to clients in other sectors, luxury brands require great care in order to ensure they don’t become too mainstream; since the mention of a brand such as Caviar de Riofrío in some media can be negative, filtering media coverage is of the utmost importance.

For an agency, working with a brand like Caviar de Riofrío is a great privilege because it gives you the opportunity to innovate and feel uncomfortable (in a good way), something that other more standardized companies do not allow or do to a lesser extent. This aspect is very important today, when we continually talk about terms like ‘disruptive’, but we keep doing more of the same every day. Here we carefully engage in activities that may be deemed risky because the image of our client’s brand cannot be damaged at any time.