Theme: Introducing MAENA (2/2): A New Lens on Luxury Brand Strategy
There is one question that drives most brand strategy meetings. It is not necessarily always the right one.
THE QUESTION BRANDS KEEP ASKING
“How do we communicate this better?” It is the question I have heard, in slightly different forms, across every organisation I have worked with. And the fact that it is always the first question asked reveals something fundamental about how most brands understand their own strategic challenge.
The assumption embedded in that question is that the problem is always one of expression. That if a brand is underperforming, failing to connect, or losing ground to competitors, the solution lies in finding sharper words, a stronger visual identity, a more compelling campaign. Adjust the message. Change the tone. Try a different format.
Communication is a vehicle. It carries something. And the quality of what it carries, the meaning in luxury branding — the depth, the authenticity, the cultural resonance of the brand it is meant to express — determines whether that vehicle actually reaches anyone, or simply passes by.
WHAT COMMUNICATION CAN AND CANNOT DO
Communication strategy, at its best, is the art of translating a brand’s identity into language, image, and experience that connects with the people it is designed for. It is a craft. Done well, it creates recognition, builds emotional proximity, and drives preference.
But communication strategy cannot create meaning where none exists. It can amplify, clarify, and express — it cannot invent. When brands confuse the two, they invest considerable resources in crafting messages that ring hollow, because they are not grounded in anything real.
This is what happens when a brand’s strategy meetings revolve entirely around “what to say this season” rather than “what this brand fundamentally is.” The messages change. The campaigns refresh. But the underlying brand identity remains vague, borrowed, or inconsistent with the actual product experience.
Messaging without meaning is not neutral. It actively dilutes brand equity. Each new campaign that does not connect to a coherent brand identity makes the next one harder to land. Audiences may not be able to articulate this disconnect, but they feel it. They engage less deeply. They switch more easily. They stop believing.
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN MESSAGE AND MEANING
A message is what you say. Meaning is what people hold about you when you say nothing.
This distinction has significant strategic implications. It is the reason why certain brands can go quiet for months and return with a single image that instantly resonates — while others invest in high-frequency, high-production campaigns and still fail to build a loyal audience.
Meaning accrues over time. It is built through the consistency of a brand’s choices: what it makes, what it refuses, who it aligns with, what it charges, where it appears and where it chooses not to. These decisions, accumulated and coherent, create a distinct cultural position — something that exists in the minds of audiences independently of any single communication effort.
When that cultural position is well-defined, communication becomes dramatically more effective. Messages land with resonance because they reinforce something already believed. When it is absent, even the most sophisticated campaigns are essentially starting from zero — each one trying to establish, rather than deepen, a relationship.
WHY LUXURY IS THE MOST EXPOSED CATEGORY
In luxury and premium branding specifically, the gap between messaging and meaning carries extraordinary weight. Luxury, at its core, is a promise about depth: that the object or experience carries something beyond its functional value — a cultural referent, an aesthetic vision, a relationship to history, savoir-faire, or identity.
When luxury brands communicate without this depth — when their campaigns are produced to the highest technical standard but do not express a genuine, distinctive identity — they paradoxically undermine the very promise they are meant to deliver.
Consumers do not invest in luxury products simply because the advertisement was beautiful. They invest because the brand represents something they want to belong to, identify with, or carry a piece of. That “something” is cultural significance. It cannot be manufactured through a brief. It must be earned through a series of choices that give the brand a real and distinct position in the cultural landscape.
The luxury brands that have built enduring desirability — regardless of category, price point, or heritage — share this quality: their identity is not communicated. It is embodied. Their campaigns do not explain what the brand is. They simply extend it.
THE CULTURAL SIGNIFICANCE GAP
Most brands, in my experience, sit somewhere between genuine cultural significance and pure messaging exercise. They carry something real — a heritage, a founding vision, a design signature, a set of values that, at their best, make the brand genuinely singular. But that “something” has not always been excavated, articulated, or turned into a strategic tool.
As a result, when campaigns are developed, they draw on the most legible and visible elements of the brand’s identity — the archive, the signature product, the established aesthetic codes — while leaving deeper questions unaddressed. What cultural conversation does this brand belong to? What does it stand for beyond its category? What does it say about the people who choose it?
These questions feel philosophical. In practice, they are operational. Brands that can answer them have a navigational clarity that transforms how they make decisions — about distribution, about partnerships, about the cultural territories they enter or refuse. Brands that cannot answer them default to benchmarking, and gradually converge toward the centre of their category.
BUILDING MEANING REQUIRES A DIFFERENT KIND OF WORK
Building cultural significance is not the work of a campaign. It is the work of brand strategy — patient, upstream, and grounded in a genuine understanding of what a brand is for and who it is for.
It begins with articulation: finding the precise language for a brand’s identity, positioning, and cultural proposition. A working document that captures the brand’s real conviction — what it believes, what it refuses, what it aspires to express through every product, every touchpoint, every communication.
This articulation also requires a deliberate choice about emotional territory. Every brand occupies — whether consciously or by default — a space in the emotional lives of its audience. The question is not whether a brand evokes feelings, but which feelings it intentionally cultivates: elevation and aspiration, intimacy and belonging, tension and edge, serenity and timelessness. Defining this emotional register determines which stories the brand can credibly tell, which partnerships are coherent, and which cultural moments it should enter or refuse. A brand that has not chosen its emotional repertoire will borrow unconsciously from whoever it benchmarks, and gradually lose the distinctiveness that made it worth noticing.
From that foundation, cultural significance is built through selection: choosing the cultural territories, creative partners, media environments, and brand moments that are genuinely coherent with the brand’s identity — and having the discipline to refuse those that are not, however commercially attractive they may appear.
The brands that have built real cultural authority rarely did so by saying more. They built it by being more coherent — more committed, more selective, more willing to let their identity lead rather than follow the market.
THE ASSET BRANDS MAY FORGET TO BUILD
In a market where attention is cheap and trust is expensive, cultural significance is arguably the most durable competitive advantage available to premium brands. It takes time to build and, once established, is genuinely difficult to replicate. Heritage can be mimicked. Visual identity can be referenced. Even signature products can be imitated. But the deep cultural position of a brand with genuine meaning — the intangible sense that it stands for something real — resists imitation almost entirely.
This is the asset that most brands under-invest in, precisely because it does not appear in campaign KPIs or quarterly results. It is built in the choices that precede communication: in the clarity of identity, the coherence of positioning, and the consistency of the brand’s relationship to the culture it inhabits.
The brands that will build lasting desirability in the years ahead will be those that learn to ask, before “how do we say this,” the more demanding question: what do we actually stand for — and is everything we do a genuine expression of that?
Because in a landscape saturated with messages, meaning is what cuts through and what enhances brand equity.
It is this conviction that led me to found MAENA Agency. After a decade spent inside luxury and beauty organisations, navigating the distance between what brands intend and what they manage to express, I built MAENA Agency around a single belief: that the most valuable strategic work begins upstream — before the campaign, before the brief, at the level of identity, cultural positioning, and the precise articulation of what makes a brand irreplaceable. That is where lasting desirability begins. And that, in the end, is the only brief that matters.
Marine Moureaux-Gall / MAENA Agency
