Luxury Brands Target ‘Desirability First’ — But How to Measure It?

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Hello from Paris, where I have just about recovered from Saturday’s Butt magazine party at La Station Gare des Mines. It was a good one.

For a fashion party to be truly fun is rare. Which is just another reason to lament that Courrèges is parting ways with its designer of five years, Nicolas Di Felice. Under his direction, the brand threw a killer party.

More importantly, he radically improved the brand’s design and storytelling. I like the way the clothes provide a sort of instant silhouette: One piece makes the outfit. This was always the case at Courrèges, but in a stiffer, more retro way. Di Felice’s approach was lighter, sexier, more modern — and yet still functional.

Speaking of endings: Sources say La Station Gare des Mines (a tentpole of Paris nightlife located across the street from Chanel’s 19M craftsmanship hub) will have to close its doors by year-end, unable to delay construction for the surrounding urban development project any longer. The collective that runs the club is looking for an alternate location, but no luck yet.

The Tricky Business of Measuring Desire

Moving on to our main topic this week: desirability. This was the mot du jour when Kering’s new CEO Luca de Meo gave his first presentation to analysts at the Boucheron flagship store in Paris March 11. “Desirability first” — not just growth — is expected to be his guiding light as he reengineers the group. Alongside EBIT and return on capital employed, desirability is also meant to become a key metric for gauging managers’ performance.

It’s long been a favourite term of LVMH chairman Bernard Arnault, too. “Desirability is the key to our success. If you have high desirability, you don’t need to push the product; the product pulls the customer,” Arnault said at a press conference in 2024.

But what is desirability? Can it really be measured? The question is certainly top of mind, as luxury’s prolonged slowdown has made brands more prudent when it comes to investing in both marketing and retail. Brands are having to weigh carefully the kinds of campaigns and stores that can actually move the needle on perception and sales.

As companies embark on a new cycle (with the worst of the industry-wide slump hoped to be behind us, geopolitics permitting) how can they incentivise managers to pursue healthy growth and not take shortcuts to higher sales — encouraging tactics that enhance desirability rather than burning through it?

At Kering, Bottega Veneta is probably the poster child for this approach — having taken advantage of its recent era of increased fashion buzz to spotlight its top-end craftsmanship and weed out less desirable parts of its business. Rather than maximising its growth potential, it’s focused on charting a sustainable path. Much of the same could be said for Saint Laurent.

Of course “desirability” isn’t actually a metric, but rather an intangible quality — one that is quite tricky to isolate. Very broadly speaking it refers to how many customers are aware of and desirous of a brand, and how intensely. How respected — even loved — is a brand? For luxury houses rooted in exclusivity, desirability also usually requires some sort of gap between awareness and accessibility: more people need to aspire to owning a brand’s products than actually do.

Technology is making it more alluring than ever to try to estimate desirability. Whereas measures of brand heat like EMV (earned media value) and MIV (Launchmetrics’ signature “media impact value” product) have been providing insight to the volume of buzz, AI is making it easier for data providers and brands to filter these insights through sentiment — whether or not online discourse is actually positive.

These increasingly refined brand metrics can be factored in alongside survey results (a longstanding method for making the qualitative quantitative) search and traffic data, and hard financial indicators. Rather than incentivising CEOs on top-line sales — which can conceal un-desirable moves including low-quality wholesale, unnecessary store openings and more — groups like Kering may opt to mix these data points up in a sort of “formula” for desirability.

I polled a few luxury executives and analysts to ask what they would include in a desirability score.

Robert Triefus, CEO of Stone Island, said he uses no less than 30 metrics to monitor the brand’s desirability. Which ones are relevant KPIs for management depends on a person’s role, but clues to how desirability is evolving can include everything from core financial metrics like full-price sell through and average selling price to clienteling feedback like event participation rates (how many clients RSVP yes, or participate repeatedly).

“Desirability is proven when clients choose the brand at full price, return repeatedly and actively engage with the world it creates,” Triefus said.

Alessio Vannetti, a brand advisor and former executive at Gucci, Valentino and Zegna, said he’d been implementing and refining his formula for desirability for over a decade. “When Stefano Pilati’s first collections were coming in at Zegna, Mr. Zegna wanted to understand how the market was responding. We’ve kept tweaking it everywhere I worked since then, but from the beginning the formula was something like: brand heat (MIV, EMV, user-generated content) crossed with sentiment plus traffic (in stores, online) crossed with the rate of conversion,” Vannetti said.

Traffic — both online and off — came up a lot. “One sure indicator is physical and digital traffic patterns over a period of time,” said outgoing Lanvin boss Siddhartha Shukla. Desirability becomes measurable “when affinity compels some action that takes the customer across the initial threshold for conversion: a shop door, the site, inscription on a social platform.”

At the same time, traffic is one of the parts of the business most exposed to exogenous shocked, as well as being in structural decline. “Young people don’t really browse anymore,” Bain partner Claudia D’Arpizio said. “Of course an empty store is a bad sign for traffic, but metrics related to search — both for the brand and specific products—are becoming more relevant now.”

The bigger the brand, the more access to proprietary data. Conversion data that pinpoints how far potential clients are going in the funnel before turning back. Clienteling data that shows how much and how often loyal customers spend over time. Focus groups to gauge responses to marketing and collections.

Customer surveys following store visits help track net promoter score — “which shows not just whether the customer is thinking about you, but whether they’re going to advocate for you,” D’Arpizio said.

Net promoter score as well as return shopping or customer loyalty are metrics that help go beyond “whether a brand is in the mental shopping list of customers, but speak to the strength and longevity of desirability,” D’Arpizio said. “It isn’t just desirability, but customer love.” All of these metrics are getting easier to collect and analyse at scale with the help of AI.

Still, each data point for desirability needs to be taken in context: Brand visibility only matters if it’s positive (or at least not negative). Traffic is subject to macro-economic and geopolitical shocks—and is worth little if conversion rates remain low. A lift in sales doesn’t say as much about desirability — or can even be detrimental to desire — if it’s powered by promotions, price cuts, or a shift to selling greater volumes of lower-priced product.

Once the market catches on that a brand has an issue with desirability, it’s unlikely a brand can change perception by touting improvements to MIV, customer surveys, sentiment or other “soft” indicators of desirability. Focus then turns to hard financial metrics: like-for-like retail sales, full-price sell-through, average unit price (weighted by volume) and sales per square meter. These remain the “gold standard” proxies for measuring desirability — metrics that leave nowhere to hide.