Learn to say no. A lesson from the Luxury Industry

You can be anything you want in life, but not everything you want. - Ray Dalio

Life is full of distractions. If you are a curious mind, and you are experiencing any level of success, many of these distractions will look like opportunities; tantalising ones.

Giving them up is difficult. They may present themselves as new customers or potential partners. As platforms to gain visibility, or a way to make extra and easy money. And yet, they are killers in disguise, for they will kill the possibility of reaching the top of your own niche and unique potential.

Cristiano Ronaldo, the most popular football player of our times, is famous for having a strict post-match routine. Instead of winding down after a match in one of his luxury houses, or throw a lavish party to celebrate a victory, he undergoes a 30 minute bath therapy made of hot and cold showers, swims for 20 minutes, and gets steamed for 5 minutes.

For both individuals and businesses, learning to say NO is vital. It is as they grow, and also as they reach considerable size, for the number of distractions can only increase as they gain weight, popularity and relevance.

Saying the right amount of NOs is good for the business and is good for the mind; I will prove it with success stories from the luxury industry and with scientific findings.

LUXURY BRANDS SAY LOTS OF NOs

Very few industries are as strict as the luxury industry when it comes to protecting their positioning and value preposition. This is because the very idea of luxury is based on the inverted proportion between desirability and availability. The more a product, or a brand, is desirable, the less available it should be.

Or perhaps it is this scarcity that makes them desirable.

One may argue that the most successful luxury brands are now global. That they have points of sale all over the world offering a variety of product categories: from accessible luxury like beauty products and eyewear, to multi-million dollar jewellery, watches, real estate and so forth.

While this is undoubtably true, I can assure you, as an industry veteran, that it takes enormous discipline to the most successful brands to limit their options.

The more prestigious the brand and the higher its positioning, the more NOs they have to say to stay on top of their niche.

Don’t think for a minute you can walk as a first-time buyer in one of the 300+ Hermès stores spread across the globe and be able to buy a Kelly or Birkin bag, regardless of your spending power. It will take you years of high-ticket purchases to qualify for one of the iconic bags, and even then, after placing an order, you may have to wait several months, and sometimes years.

Hermès, Tiffany, Cartier, Chanel, Dior, to mention a few, never go on sale, and do not have outlet stores. They retail most of their products by themselves, in boutiques that reflect their culture and their high quality standards.

They dislike being associated with discounts, for it dilutes the perception of the brand and, by being selective with their distribution, they pursue a semi-coherent pricing policies (local customs and additional fees interfere).

Apple, which almost falls into the luxury category for its ability to charge a premium price on their devices, has entered the retail business, with cathedral-sized stores in the major cities of the world, to control the customer experience. Although they continue to wholesale their computers and smartphones, they use their store, and their genius-denominated teams to define a signature Apple experience. And the long lines outside those points of sale prove them right.

Pricing and distribution are not the only self-imposed limits of luxury companies. They also control product availability. Several brands prefer to restrain the production of the most successful collections to keep them exclusive. They withdraw products from the market and recycle or destroy them. A few years ago Louis Vuitton attracted criticism for burning unsold bags to avoid stock malpractice. Ever since, product destruction has become brands’ last resort to control availability.

Another peculiarity of the luxury industry is the precision in profiling both their target client and the customers they do NOT want to sell to.

After Louis Vuitton bags became the must-have item for Chinese women, the brand was seen as less exclusive because the bags were widely owned. Louis Vuitton responded by opening an invitation-only floor in its flagship Shanghai boutique where visitors could get their hair styled or have bags customised to their personal taste. Open only to the super-wealthy, Louis Vuitton used this exclusivity to raise the brand’s value again by excluding all but the most elite.

Chanel is presently opening new boutiques in various capitals of the world, accessible only to their most loyal and affluent clients.

This elitist strategy is grounded in a timeless human need: belonging to a group. With luxury, a group of wealthy and style-conscious individuals.

We can see the same principle in sports, with people filling stadium and arenas supporting their team. Or in music, where people develop a bound for their love of jazz, heavy metal, classical music, or a specific artist. And they spend their money accordingly.

Image is another area of focus and strict attention for luxury companies. I remember, for example, during my time in Gucci, the extreme attention to the use of logos and brand colours. From letterheads to billboards and anything in between, very detailed guidelines had to be followed religiously.

When choosing a testimonial, luxury houses put reputation over popularity.

We can’t count the times a celebrity has lost a multi-million dollar contract because of a behaviour that was judged deemed by their sponsor.

Everyone remembers when Dior fired celebrity designer John Galliano in 2011 for making anti-Semitic comments on a video that went viral. And since the story repeats itself, rapper Kanye Waste had contracts with Balenciaga, Adidas and Gap cancelled after turning again Jewish people on Twitter. “I lost 2 billion $ in a day” the star declared last week.

After signing a contract with Swiss watchmaker Raymond Weil, actress Charlize Theron found herself in some serious watch drama in 2008. Theron violated the terms of her contract by wearing (and being photographed) a Christian Dior watch, resulting in the company suing her for $20 million.

In 2005, model Kate Moss lost not one but three endorsements with Burberry, Chanel and H&M after a photo surfaced of her doing cocaine.

Last year, the Chinese-Canadian pop star Kris Wu, shocked Asia and the luxury brands partnering with him for what we can describe as a predatory behaviour against young women. Bulgari, Porsche, and Louis Vuitton immediately cut ties with him.

Prada made the bold step to drop their brand ambassador in China, the popular actress Zheng Shuang, after her ex-husband accused her of trying to abandon two young children the couple had through a U.S.-based surrogate.

China is not a forgiving market for bad behaviour. In 2021, an ex-girlfriend accused the enormously popular Lucas Huang of fraud and manipulation. Little helped a social media post in which he announced he needed to engage in “deep self-reflection” and Gucci quietly and quickly scrubbed images of the idol from its Qixi campaign.

THE SCIENCE BEHIND FOCUS

Learning to say no means learning to focus. On one thing at a time. On what really matters. On what pays back in the long-run.

“Our capacity for success lies not so much with our intelligence but with our focus. When we mobilise our power of thought toward a single issue for a prolonged time, we can achieve spectacular results,” wrote Dr Richard Blackaby on “The Incredible Power of Focus”.

Modern society is obsessed with multi-tasking, linking it with productivity. Nothing could be further from reality, for multi-tasking not only decreases productivity, it also kills quality and innovation.

Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill, J.P. Morgan were famous for their incredible ability to concentrate.

John Rockefeller once observed, “Many of us fail to achieve big things because we lack concentration; the art of concentrating the mind on the thing to be done at the proper time and to the exclusion of everything else” “

It takes discipline to focus the mind on one task at a time, in the era of multiple distraction. And yet doing so helps the brain develop a habit to concentrate so to unleash more potential.

For many decades, it was thought that the brain was a non-renewable organ until a better understanding of it lead to the discovery of what it is widely known today as neuroplasticity.

Neuroplasticity refers to the brain’s ability to adapt. Or, as Dr Celeste Campbell puts it: “It refers to the physiological changes in the brain that happen as the result of our interactions with our environment. From the time the brain begins to develop in utero until the day we die, the connections among the cells in our brains reorganise in response to our changing needs. This dynamic process allows us to learn from and adapt to different experiences ”.

Because of the above, what you consistently focus on changes dramatically the course of development of your brain.

Psychologist and founder of Hey Sigmund, Karen Young, wrote, “What you focus on will determine the parts of your brain that fire, wire and strengthen. Then, as those parts of the brain switch on and the neurons start firing, lasting connections will be made, strengthening memories and influencing what the brain will attend to in the future; positive or negative”.

CONCLUSIONS

It takes determination, vision and gut to say NO to opportunities and distractions.

It also takes discipline, for any good habit needs time and practice to be fully metabolised by the body and the mind.

You can choose to embrace focus today and allow your brain to adapt to it.

Start slow, for small steps are easily achievable, and lead to small victories that will help you build momentum.

Make time for a daily reflection on what really matters, in the long run, in your life and your business. These are the activities, the ideas and the people you need to focus on and pay attention to.

Make good use of the Pareto Principle, or the 80/20 rule, which states that for many phenomena 80% of the result comes from 20% of the effort.

When we blather about trivial things, we ourselves become trivial, for our attention gets taken up with trivialities. You become what you give your attention to. - Epictetus "The Art of living"

Carlo Pignataro

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