Using Invite-Only Marketing As A Winning Strategy In High-End Luxury Branding

The high-end luxury world of exclusive jewelry, cigars, whisky, cars and fashion is only available to the selected few rich and famous. And with Trump’s new threat for tariffs on EU top luxury brands, these products may become even less affordable and more exclusive soon. A conversation I had with Michael Hakopian and Taron Mosesian, co-founders of the Dutch luxury branding agency Studio Succes, gives us an insightful peek into this world and into how they approach it with their strict invite-only policy.

Common forms of invite-only marketing

Invite-only marketing is a popular marketing strategy to increase the desirability of a product or service by restricting access to invited people only. Its main characteristic is that you can only buy a product or service when being invited by the company, or by an inner circle around it.

Facebook used this strategy to get started, Google used it when launching Gmail and OnePlus used it when launching the One phone. Furthermore, it is also used by startups as an inexpensive word-of-mouth tactic that, so it is hoped, will generate a lot of free publicity.

What these and most other cases of invite-only marketing have in common that circulate on the Internet, is that the invite-only principle is only used in the early stages of a product launch. They all target at a mass-consumer market where, after the initial buzz-generating stages, the product is widely available and mass-marketed in a more open way, making it accessible to everyone interested…[Read more]