We’re seeing the writing on the wall for high-end luxury magazines. Recent issues look thin and titles like Vanity Fair are anemic shadows of their Graydon Carter heyday. These publications are no longer moving the needle for their luxury clients and advertisers.
What’s more, some digital marketing isn’t working for the highest end customers who matter most. According to McKinsey, just 2-4% of the global luxury customer base drives approximately 40% of market spend (and most of the projected growth).
But digital ads increasingly fail to connect with these top-tier customers. While it might work well for mass luxury, the sludge and maw of digital marketing in some ways represents the antithesis of exclusivity. When everyone sees the same content, the mystique evaporates.
Enter hospitality: luxury’s new battleground.
The Experiential Pivot
Physical hospitality experiences solve the digital dilemma. They’re inherently limited by space, time, and access. They require invitations (exclusivity) and demand effort to attend (customer commitment). There’s more surface area for brands to create an emotional connection.
Plus, physical experiences are opportunities to flex true creativity.
If you’ve been paying attention to beach umbrellas at high-end hotels, the activations at Salone in Milan, and other places where the top-tier congregate (think F1 races and festivals), there is a substantial experiential pivot at play.
Saint Laurent gets it. Their partnership with LA’s cult sushi spot, Sushi Park (notably housed in a normal strip mall on Sunset and feeding celebs like John Mayer), brought the restaurant to Paris through creative director Anthony Vaccarello’s creative lens. This wasn’t just another branded café – it was a collision of two interesting worlds creating cultural gravity.
Prada has also executed this well. Mi Shang, their first standalone restaurant in Asia, tapped filmmaker Wong Kar Wai to design the space. It’s not a restaurant with a logo, rather it’s Prada’s aesthetic universe made tangible.
Fundamental Strategic Shifts
These moves aren’t gimmicks. They’re calculated responses to a fundamental shift in the market. This shouldn’t be surprising when so many high-net-worth individuals are reallocating luxury spend from goods to experiences like travel and wellness.
As I wrote about in a previous column, Louis Vuitton’s café at Doha’s Hamad International Airport isn’t just another F&B outlet – it’s a strategic beachhead. By placing a branded experience in a luxury travel hub, LV establishes relevance among the region’s wealth in a context that feels authentic rather than nakedly commercial.
Dior’s wellness expansion follows similar logic. Their spa outposts from Southeast Asia to Montauk, Aspen and Portofino create brand touchpoints in exactly the destinations frequented by the global elite. The Dior Spa aboard the Belmond Eastern & Oriental Express takes this further, merging luxury travel with branded wellness between Singapore and Malaysia.
Soft Diplomacy
This approach also solves a critical challenge: how to enter new luxury markets like the Middle East or emerging markets in Asia without appearing opportunistic. By partnering with established hospitality names, European luxury houses gain cultural credibility they can’t build overnight.
I observed many of these early executions: Several years ago, Vacheron Constantin launched an exclusive suite for high-end clientele at the Mandarin Oriental in Dubai, and Audemars Piguet hired high-end hoteliers like Julien Laracine as they built things like AP house in LA. What started as glimmers of inspired early thinking now portends a larger shift into more sophisticated experiential marketing.
And there is certainly room for things to get more conceptual. The Balvenie collaborated with multidisciplinary creative Samuel Ross to create a deeply sensory, beautiful art installation in Milan that extrapolates the distilling process, water, copper, and all into something stunning. It wasn’t a forced brand collaboration, rather something with finesse and touch, that showed how much work it takes to make these types of collaborations sing.
The Opportunity for Hospitality
What we’re witnessing isn’t just a temporary adjustment but a fundamental reorientation of luxury marketing. As digital channels grow increasingly cluttered and ineffective for reaching the crucial top-tier, expect more luxury houses to invest in immersive, physical brand expressions. The right hotel and restaurant brands, those able to calibrate themselves and accommodate the world building of luxury partners, can create value for both sides.
And in turbulent economic times, the ability to drive growth will derive increasingly from the sustained ability to create these show-stopper moments — becoming almost as essential as product excellence itself.
