Luxury Unfiltered: The one question most luxury CEOs cannot answer

December 3, 2025

Daniel Langer is the founder and CEO of consulting firm Équité

Standing on stage in Paris recently, facing 300 luxury executives, I could feel the energy in the room.

The venue was “très magnifique,” filled with leaders from some of the most prestigious brands in the world who were confident, successful and ready to discuss the future. Then I asked them one simple question: “Can you define, in one single word, the precise emotion your brand creates in the mind of your client?”

As the room went silent, I watched the confidence evaporate.

Sea of sameness
Executives looked down at their phones or glanced at their colleagues, hoping someone else would jump in to break the tension.

A few brave souls eventually shouted out words like “quality,” “heritage” or “craftsmanship." I had to stop them.

Those are not emotions. Those are category descriptors.

Every luxury brand claims quality and craftsmanship, but if your answer is identical to your competitor’s, you have a category entry ticket rather than a strategy. This moment in Paris was not unique, as I see the exact same reaction in New York, Shanghai and Tokyo.

In my work advising boards and conducting masterclasses for top leadership teams, I consistently find this to be the single biggest vulnerability in the luxury industry. We assume we know our brands because we live with them every day, obsessing over technical details, the store design and the ad campaigns.

But we rarely obsess over the emotional outcome. The luxury industry is suffering from a crisis of distinctiveness that I call the “Sea of Sameness.”

If you walk into a multi-brand retailer and remove the logos from the handbags, you will struggle to tell who made what. Even if you read the mission statements of many luxury brands and swap the names, likely no one would notice the difference.

This is a catastrophe for value creation, and luxury is the business of extreme value creation. We do not sell function, as a $5,000 handbag does not hold items better than a $50 tote.

We sell Added Luxury Value, which is purely psychological and emotional, the anticipation of a significant positive perception shift. We are selling the story we tell ourselves when we carry that bag.

If the brand cannot define that emotion precisely, the client will never feel it. Even worse, without a clear emotion strategy, the emotional perception will resemble most other brands.

Instead of standing out, the brand loses distinctiveness.

When I lead strategy workshops, I force teams to strip away the buzzwords and forbid them from using generic terms like “quality” or “elevated service.”

These say nothing. I push them to find the singular emotional shift they want to trigger.

Do you make your client feel “rebellious,” “seduced,” “protected”?

I think it becomes clear that now we talk real emotion, and it has consequences. Once a target emotion is defined, brands have to come up with an ecosystem to bring it to life.

Most teams cannot answer because they rely on the product to do the heavy lifting, yet the product creates little value without a story that evokes a specific emotion.

The price of confusion
The inability to define this emotion has severe financial consequences.

When a brand lacks emotional clarity, it loses pricing power because clients pay a premium for meaning. They pay for the shift in how they perceive themselves, so if the brand feels generic, the willingness to pay collapses.

I often see brands trying to compensate for this lack of clarity with better service or more events, investing millions in the wrong training methods forcing their staff to follow rigorous protocols almost robotic. This is a waste of money.

In my transformative training sessions, I tell sales associates to forget the script because a script is a shield that prevents connection. I teach them to become emotional architects.

Their job is not to sell a product, but to transfer the brand’s specific emotion to the client. If the brand leadership cannot define that emotion, the staff on the floor has zero chance of delivering it.

The leadership mandate
This brings us back to that silent room in Paris. The silence was not a sign of incompetence, but rather a sign of a structural blind spot.

We are trained to manage assets, operations, supply chains, retail footprints and media spend, yet we rarely manage the intangible. In luxury, the intangible is the only thing that matters.

The algorithm of luxury value is non-linear, meaning you can have the best quality in the world and still fail if the emotional signal is weak. This is why I urge every CEO to take this test.

Gather your executive team and ask them to write down the one emotion the brand stands for, but do not let them speak to each other. If you have ten people and ten different answers, you are in trouble.

You are confusing your clients and diluting your equity.

The path forward
The brands that will win the next decade are the ones that move from selling products to creating distinct memories.

They will be the brands that define their emotional territory with surgical precision and train their teams not on steps, but on empathy. They will stop competing on features and start competing on meaning.

The next time I stand on a stage, whether in Monaco, Dubai or Los Angeles, I hope to hear fewer buzzwords and more precise, bold, emotional definitions.

Because if you don't know who you are, your client certainly won't either.

Luxury Unfiltered is a weekly column by Daniel Langer. He is the CEO of Équité, a global luxury strategy and creative brand activation firm, where he is the advisor to some of the most iconic luxury brands. He is recognized as a global top-five luxury key opinion leader. He serves as the executive professor of luxury strategy and pricing at Pepperdine University in Malibu and as a professor of luxury at New York University, New York. Dr. Langer has authored best-selling books on luxury management in English and Chinese and is a respected global keynote speaker.

Dr. Langer conducts masterclass management training on various luxury topics around the world. As a luxury expert featured on Bloomberg TV, Financial Times, The New York Times, Forbes, The Economist and others, Mr. Langer holds an MBA and a Ph.D. in luxury management and has received education from Harvard Business School. Follow him on LinkedIn and Instagram, and listen to his Future of Luxury Podcast.

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