Meta-Luxury: Brands and the Culture of Excellence

Book Review

Meta-luxury: Brands and the culture of excellence

Manfredi Ricca and Rebecca Robins Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, United Kingdom, 2012, hardback, 224pp., £26.00, ISBN: 978-0230293571

Luxury strategy in action

Jonas Hoffmann and Ivan Coste-Manière Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, United Kingdom, 201 hardback, 224pp., £26.00, 1, ISBN: 978-0230354548

Journal of Brand Management (2012) 19, 637–640. doi:10.1057/bm.2012.26

Two books dealing with the luxury industry have been recently published by Palgrave Macmillan. The first, Meta-Luxury: Brands and the Culture of Excellence, is a fascinating book written by Manfredi Ricca and Rebecca Robins, two managing directors at Interbrand, the world’s leading brand consultancy. As such, the book has from the outset a very innovative managerial orientation. This perspective is illustrated sharply by the inclusion of enlightening conversations with world leaders in diverse luxury fields. By integrating these conversations within the overall flow of the book, the authors succeeded in building an indepth and informed understanding of the new paradigm of Meta-Luxury. The first chapter briefly introduces the concept of Meta-Luxury as a needed replacement for what the authors consider the cliché of luxury. The argument is that as more and more brands define themselves as belonging to the world of luxury, and as luxury thus becomes massified, the con-

cept becomes meaningless. According to the authors, Meta-Luxury is a form of luxury that escapes the cliché of luxury and lets us move beyond it. Indeed, it is about luxury beyond luxury. It is about the culture of excellence. The second chapter presents the authors’ Meta-Luxury paradigm and provides details regarding its constituting elements of Knowledge, Purpose, Timelessness and Unique Achievement. The authors propose Meta-Luxury as an enterprise paradigm based on knowledge, purpose and the pursuit of timelessness, all of which is embodied in the notion of a...