Luxury Branding with Krug!
Nathaniel Schooler 0:29
Today I'd like to introduce one of my mentors and associates. I have been working with Douglas for five years and he is an experienced bilingual business director, transformational brand marketing leader.
I think many of you who listen to this will have seen my personal brand change over the last few few years. And Douglas has helped me to position my personal brand and, you know, get me in the right place to do business.
We discuss Luxury Branding with Krug Champage and some other key luxury brands.
Like all my associates he is someone that I have huge respect for. He was commercial director at The Lab at Leo Burnett, which was a time old advertising agency. He's done all sorts of different things, but he's also a barrister in law and a very, very interesting individual. And I think, you know, he shares some insights here from his time working at Krug Champagne and many of the other big brands in the world. He also used to write speeches for the Prime Minister of Malaysia. So I think you're going to enjoy this as a great episode.
So Douglas, when you are working with Krug Champagne, what what did you learn about their branding?
Douglas Commaille 1:41
Right? What did I learn? That's a big question. Although in essence, the the fundamentals are really very simple Krug Champagne is a luxury product and appears at the top of nearly every quality Champagne list and has done for a long time.
And I guess the question when asks oneself is how did they manage that?
Both in terms of the product and in terms of the brand, which your subject is today. I suppose the the essence of it is that they never forget, and never get distracted by novelty, or anything akin to it. And by keeping true to the essence of what the brand is, which is the quality of the product, they protect that brand, very, very carefully.
And in fact, you can see the same thing in many luxury brands, the difference between Krug Champagne, and certainly the time I worked with them, which is a few years is that what is so different. I'm trying to find the word for with effectively the people who are living out in the Far East and produce copies of their brand, right, and very accurately, cannot reproduce the quality of their brand.
Nathaniel Schooler 3:23
Right.
Douglas Commaille 3:24
And so they, to some extent, are protected from this constant stream of copying and fake goods. And, yeah, illegal production. I mean, you can see what it's done to businesses.
I mean, for example, in the sunglasses, business premium sunglasses, and let's just take Dolce & Gabbana for a minute. I mean, you can see that their business is affected by street markets out in Asia, in Kuala Lumpur or in Thailand Thailand or a in Asia generally and they've these people have done immense harm to branding, right because they've introduced the idea that a brand cannot be premium I saw recently a Louis Vuitton handbag, which was just a copy.
Nathaniel Schooler 4:27
Right.
Douglas Commaille 4:28
And it was cheap, shoddy and rather unpleasant. And it felt really horrible. I mean, you don't wear a handbag obviously. But when you touch it with your fingers, you can just tell it was probably glued together. You know, it's not going to carry anything worth having. I mean, certainly wouldn't want to carry a little pooch and it would you they do in Hollywood. And that's the big difference. It's that Krug protected their brand viciously, in that sense.
No, they didn't mess it about a mess around with it. They had very little at the time that I was with them in the way of promotional material, for example, because with a very sensible decision that if they end up trying to become too much of a novelty item, it would get in the way of the purity of the product.
Nathaniel Schooler 5:30
Right.
Douglas Commaille 5:30
So they commissioned role I think it was Rolls-Royce or Bentley to produce what was essent...
