How Luxury Companies Can Engage Customers in Product Creation

Customer co-creation in companies' innovation is becoming a popular trend across a number of different industries. If you engage customers in creating your products, you have a better chance to realize and provide to the market items that customers may really need and appreciate. But to what extent can this trend be applied to the luxury business? Who should design luxury products? Emanuela Prandelli, LVMH Associate Professor in Fashion and Luxury Management, asks in a video, which discloses the outcomes of her research.

"We wanted to better figure out what are the constraints that might suggest to companies in the luxury field to play with this trend but at some conditions", Prof. Prandelli says. "Specifically what we discovered is that in luxury we can clearly find customers that are attracted by exclusivity, that want products that signal high quality. A few experiments we run show that if you engage the very same customers in the product definition this kind of feeling may be partially reduced".

Nonetheless, there are some specific opportunities as to play with luxury and customer engagement. You may, for instance, decide to engage customers not in the very core products definition but in some peripheral initiative of the company, also in the marketing field. And also the specific type of product category you are going to select for co-creation makes a huge difference. If luxury brands are going to engage customers in those product categories considered less status-relevant (e.g. sneakers vs. leather shoes) this has a strong impact on the specific perception by customers.

And finally, self-customization may also represent a viable alternative, where the idea is that you are not engaging customers in creating the products that the entire market is then going to buy, but only letting customers be engaged in the personalization of the specific product each one of them is going to buy. At these conditions co-creation may represent a very interesting and appealing strategy also for luxury brands that, in this way, can benefit from a strong customer engagement.