The course discusses the luxury industry, with a focus on strategy, innovation and marketing. It is structured as to provide students with the distinctive principles for effective management of luxury businesses, brands, products and services. The course explores how, luxury firms and industry have been successful, and what other businesses could learn from them. The course offers a broad overview of the luxury concepts and trains students on how to use those concepts to work in Strategy, Consulting, Innovation or Marketing, in the luxury industry, or in any other sector where those strategies may be relevant.

Classes combine theory and practice through lectures, case studies and projects. Besides the concepts taught and discussed in class, students will develop skills through the group project.

This course will examine the unique aspects of services management and marketing, with a particular focus on services in the luxury environment. The methodology used will be both theoretical and practical.

Underlying the approach of this course is the “service perspective”. Ac-cording to this perspective, customers are not looking for goods or services, but rather for benefits or solutions to their problems. In other words, to be competitive, firms need to understand their selected customers’ total needs in order to design and deliver the core solution: the pertinent package of goods and services. But beyond that, the solution should also include other relevant billable, and non-billable services, such as invoicing, complaint handling, advice and personal attention, information, and other value-adding components. In this service perspective, the role of service components in building and maintaining customer relationships is fundamental and strategic, and sustainable competitive advantage can only be created by understanding and meeting every element of the individual customer relationship.

Given the highly demanding and discriminating behavior and needs of the “luxury” buyer, effectively embracing and implementing the service perspective becomes even more imperative if a firm is to succeed in this highly competitive market.

This course will also examine, through various case studies and discussions, services as they relate to fields of hospitality, retail, wines, art, event management, and professional services.

Luxury brands spent much of the last decade trying to improve their distribution channels. These efforts coincided with the growth of the online marketplace that contributed to the development of fears of digital threats to both price policies and control of distribution, which are two fundamental pillars of modern luxury. As a result, the luxury industry was relatively slow to adopt digital media.

But after a slow start, the industry has raced forward to seize online opportunities. Being late in the development has allowed players to take advantage of established technologies and learn from the missteps of first movers and, today, the luxury industry is evolving towards a new reality where the physical and digital worlds are merging, allowing brands to tap a deep pool of profitable growth.

This course offers insights and execution plans on digital key strategies and business models in the luxury industry.

This course investigates the dynamics of human behavior and how it relates to decision making in the luxury sector. It concentrates on the most important factors that influence the consumer’s decision making process. These include, at the individual level, motivations, personality traits and the self-concept, values and lifestyles, as well as psychological processes and at the social and cultural level, group membership, social classes and subcultures. The course also discusses definitions of culture and how these affect postmodern consumer moves, how members of different cultures vary, and on what criteria they can and cannot be compared. The impact of individual, social and cultural differences on information processing and decision-making is highlighted, as well as the consequences for consumer research techniques, segmentation, targeting and positioning and communication strategies in the luxury industry.