Emotional impact is the new metric of luxury success

Luxury is entering a decisive moment. For decades, the industry has relied on familiar performance indicators. Sales, margins, and market share give the impression of clarity. To evaluate customer satisfaction, many brands use the net promoter score. All these metrics still matter, but they no longer define success. The true driver of long-term brand value is emotional impact. What clients feel in every interaction determines how much they desire a brand, how loyal they become, and how confidently they advocate for it. This shift is clear in both my consulting work and academic research: emotions drive most luxury purchase decisions. Clients do not choose a brand only for its rational benefits. The true (and often hidden) driver is how the brand amplifies how they feel about themselves. Emotional impact: The true driver of luxury value The main reason people pay premiums for luxury is the anticipated positive perception shift. However, most companies focus on products and ignore what people are really buying. These clients buy luxury because it aligns with the person they aspire to be. When a brand creates that emotional resonance, it becomes extremely valuable. When it does not, even exceptional craftsmanship fails to create desire. The world is full of exceptional products that don’t sell. Emotional impact leads to measurable results. Brands with high emotional engagement consistently show dramatically stronger pricing power and significantly higher retention rates. They attract clients who return not because of loyalty programs but because the brand has become part of their emotional life. Emotional connection predicts performance far more reliably than any short-term metric. This evolution is driven by a fundamental shift in client psychology. Millennials and Gen Z expect luxury to be meaningful, authentic, and aligned with their values. They want to be inspired, not impressed. They search for transformation, not possession. The center of gravity has moved from the object to the emotion, from ownership to identity. Make me care: The emotional gap in luxury However, most luxury brands struggle to create this level of emotional impact. The reason is simple: their brand stories are still rooted in product and category. They talk about heritage, materials, techniques, and craftsmanship. All of this matters, but it does not give the client an emotional reason to care. And this is the most important point: make me care! When I work with brands, the first thing I try to solve is, why should people care? What does the extreme value creation model look like? Most companies don’t have clarity around that. The reason lies in marketing myopia. Every brand on the planet is convinced that it is the best in its category. And this response is very human. When we invest a significant amount of time into managing a brand, we naturally want to believe in its superiority. But clients have plenty of choices. And when it comes to what drives their positive perception shift, it will be an emotional response to the brand story. Emotions matter most when it comes to the perceived value. A product-driven story does not create belonging or aspiration. It does not define how the client should feel. It is not a compass for human interaction. If a brand wants to create a distinct emotional response in a boutique or during a human interaction, that emotion must be explicitly defined in the brand story. I call it the target emotion. Teams need to know the feeling they are supposed to evoke and their role in delivering that emotion. Without this clarity, the experience becomes inconsistent and generic. This is one of the biggest holdbacks for luxury brands today. They design experiences without defining the emotion that should guide them. The result is a service that feels more of the same and transactional rather than inspiring and transformative. A guide to generating extreme value This is precisely where my “4E of Luxury” framework becomes essential. By focusing on emotion, experience, engagement, and exclusivity, brands gain a structured roadmap for generating extreme value. Emotion defines the feeling the brand wants to evoke. Experience translates this feeling into the client journey. Engagement ensures interaction that is personal, meaningful, and context-aware. Exclusivity reinforces empathy, rarity, and depth rather than relying on outdated ideas of scarcity. Together, the 4E framework provides a blueprint for building emotional gravity in a world where clients seek purpose and identity. To apply this thinking, brands must reimagine every touchpoint. When a client enters a store, they should immediately feel the brand’s emotional world. Confidence, power, serenity, inspiration. Whatever the chosen emotion is, it must be clear. It must be intentional. It must be consistent. If teams cannot articulate the emotion, they cannot deliver it. Internal culture becomes the foundation of emotional excellence. A brand cannot inspire clients if it does not inspire its own people. Teams must feel the brand’s purpose. They must understand why the brand matters. They must be trained not only in product knowledge but also in emotional understanding. Emotion needs to be practiced, rehearsed, and lived. Clients sense authenticity instantly. Inspired teams naturally create inspired moments. Technology now enhances this work. Data and artificial intelligence can quantify emotional response, identify sentiment patterns, and reveal where clients feel uplifted or disconnected. Technology helps refine the experience, but the emotion itself must come from human intention. Luxury will be defined by the interplay of data and empathy, of precision and intuition. Leaders need to update how they define success. Quarterly numbers matter, but emotional equity matters more. If clients leave an interaction feeling unchanged, the brand loses value even if sales temporarily rise. Emotional equity is fragile. Once it erodes, it is difficult to rebuild. No marketing campaign can compete with the power of a brand that consistently shapes how people feel. In a world of infinite choice and limited attention, emotion is the ultimate scarcity. Are you ready? This is an opinion piece by Daniel Langer, CEO of Équité, recognized as one of the “Global Top Five Luxury Key Opinion Leaders,” and advisor to some of the most iconic luxury brands in the world. He serves as an executive professor of luxury strategy and pricing at Pepperdine University in Malibu and as a professor of luxury at NYU, New York. Daniel has authored best-selling books on luxury management in English and Chinese, and is a respected global keynote speaker. Daniel conducts in-person masterclasses on various luxury topics across the world. As a luxury expert featured on Bloomberg TV, Forbes, The Economist, and others, Daniel holds an MBA and a Ph.D. in luxury management and has received education from Harvard Business School. Sign up for his online luxury masterclasses at the Jing Academy.

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Emotional impact is the new metric of luxury success