The Anti-Laws, Revisited

I found Kapferer before Kapferer found me. It was around 2005, I was at Spyker Cars, and trying to understand why luxury worked the way it did. I read Bain reports, dug into whatever academic material I could find, and kept running into the same name — Jean-Noël Kapferer. When he and Vincent Bastien published The Luxury Strategy in 2009, I bought it immediately. It was the first book I’d encountered that treated luxury not as a market segment but as a system of beliefs — a philosophical machinery with its own internal logic.

A few years later, when I started studying at EURIB — the European Institute for Brand Management at Erasmus University in Rotterdam — the book resurfaced as assigned reading. By then I’d already absorbed most of it, but the academic context gave it new weight. I used it as a foundation for my final thesis on conspicuous consumption, which forced me to test Kapferer’s framework against the sociological literature rather than just nodding along. The book was about something specific: it told you what luxury brands should not do.

Kapferer and Bastien had distilled eighteen principles they called the “anti-laws of marketing.” Each one inverted a piece of conventional marketing wisdom. Don’t listen to your customers. Don’t respond to demand. Don’t try to sell. The tone was deliberately provocative, but the arguments behind each anti-law were careful, rooted in the sociology of luxury and decades of practice. If you’ve spent any time in brand meetings where the gravitational pull is always toward doing more, you know that being told what not to do is the harder and more useful kind of instruction.

That was seventeen years ago. The book has been through three editions, the latest published in 2025. I’ve spent the intervening years in and around luxury marketing — at Spyker, at Vitters Shipyard, at Wajer, and in work that kept brushing against these principles. The question I want to test here is simple: which anti-laws still hold, which are under strain, and what does the difference tell us about what luxury actually is?

I’ve picked seven. Not a comprehensive review — just the ones I’ve felt most directly, where I have experience or an opinion worth testing.

The ones that held

Forget about positioning

Anti-law number one. In conventional marketing, positioning is everything — you define yourself relative to competitors. Luxury, Kapferer argued, is identity, not comparison. You don’t benchmark. You don’t occupy a position on a perceptual map. You simply are.

At Spyker, this wasn’t theory. It was survival. The brand existed in a competitive set with Bentley, Ferrari, Aston Martin — cars that outsold it by orders of magnitude, with dealer networks and marketing budgets Spyker couldn’t approach. Any positioning exercise would have concluded: you can’t win here. But Spyker never tried to win there. The cars had aviation-derived designs that looked like nothing else on the road. The brand carried a history of unimaginable achievement and pedigree. And where competitors were designed by committee, Spyker had a single creator — the whole vision traced back to one person. The brand’s identity was eccentric, uncompromising, a little bit mad. It wasn’t positioned against Ferrari. It existed in its own space entirely.

This principle has only strengthened with time. The brand that lives this most visibly today is Hermes. No positioning statements. No competitive benchmarking. An identity rooted in equestrian heritage and artisanal craft that hasn’t shifted in decades. In 2024, while the personal luxury market contracted for the first time in fifteen years, Hermes grew fifteen percent to over fifteen billion euros in revenue, with a forty percent operating margin.¹ They don’t occupy a position. They occupy a universe.

Don’t pander to your customers’ wishes

Anti-law three. In mass marketing, the customer is king — you listen, you respond, you give them what they want. In luxury, the creative vision leads. As Kapferer put it: “There are two ways to go bankrupt: not listening to the client, but also listening to them too much.”

The instructive contrast right now is Hermes and Gucci. Hermes still dictates. The customer doesn’t choose a Birkin — Hermes decides if you’re worthy of the opportunity to buy one. The creative direction doesn’t chase trends or respond to social media sentiment. Under Alessandro Michele, Gucci did the opposite: it chased the Gen Z consumer, rewired the aesthetic for Instagram, and for a few years the numbers looked spectacular. Revenue peaked at nearly eleven billion euros in 2022. Then the audience moved on, as audiences always do when you’ve been following rather than leading. By 2024, revenue had dropped twenty-three percent. De Sarno was hired to fix it, fired within two years when he couldn’t, and at the time of writing Gucci still hasn’t named a successor.²

I know this tension from the inside. Sitting in meetings where customer research says one thing and brand instinct says another is uncomfortable. The data is right there. The sample sizes are decent. The customer is telling you what they want. But the job of a luxury brand — and this is what Kapferer taught me before I had the experience to understand it — is to know something the customer doesn’t yet know they want. That’s not arrogance. It’s the entire premise. At Spyker, we had a version of this story: the D12 Super-SUV. We understood what the customer would want before SSUVs consumed the luxury market — years before the Bentayga or the Urus existed. We never had the funds to put it into production. But the instinct was right, and the market proved it.

Don’t respond to rising demand

Anti-law five. When demand rises, conventional marketing says: scale up, capture the opportunity, expand distribution. Luxury says the opposite. Scarcity is strategy, not limitation.

The textbook case is the Birkin. Hermes has a multi-year waiting list, produces fewer bags than the market demands, and the secondary market premium confirms the strategy works — resale prices regularly exceed retail. The scarcity is the product. Remove it, and you remove the desire.

I saw this from a different angle at Vitters. Superyachts are inherently scarce. A sailing yacht of sixty metres or more takes two to three years to build. At any given time, the yard had two or three projects running. There was no way to “scale up” — the craftsmen, the dock space, the engineering complexity all imposed natural limits. Early on, I thought of this as a constraint. But it was an advantage that no marketing strategy could replicate. Every yacht was a commission, every client knew they were one of very few, and the waiting itself was part of the experience. Kapferer would have recognized it immediately.

What makes this anti-law hard to follow isn’t the logic — the logic is clear. It’s the forces arrayed against it. Sales wants to hit targets. Finance wants to model growth. An external investor wants to see the line go up. Even internally, there are always people fighting this approach, pushing to capture demand while it’s there. Restraint is a strategy that requires everyone in the room to believe in it, and in most rooms, someone doesn’t.

Don’t relocate your factories

Anti-law eighteen. Cost reduction drives manufacturing offshoring in mass markets. In luxury, provenance is non-negotiable. The place where something is made is part of what it is.

This has not weakened. “Made in Italy” and “Made in France” remain the most powerful signals in luxury goods. Hermes manufactures in France. Ferrari builds in Maranello. The link between place and product is a claim about heritage, skill, and continuity that can’t be replicated in a lower-cost facility.

Spyker built its cars in Zeewolde, a small town in Flevoland. Not exactly the Emilia-Romagna of the Netherlands. But the cars were hand-built there, every one of them, and the factory was part of the story — visits were a ritual for buyers and journalists. The provenance wasn’t glamorous, but it was authentic. The cars came from a specific place, built by specific people, and that specificity was part of the brand’s claim to being real. The same is true in the superyacht world — Wajer builds its yachts in Heeg and Lemmer, two small Frisian towns most people couldn’t find on a map, and “Holland” itself has become a provenance mark in the industry, signalling a tradition of shipbuilding and engineering that buyers trust implicitly.

The thought experiment that clarifies this: imagine Ferrari moved production to Germany. The build quality might go up. The tolerances might tighten. The paint finish might improve. But it wouldn’t be a Ferrari anymore — not in the way that matters. The product is inseparable from Maranello, from the specific air and light and tradition of that place. Provenance isn’t a quality claim. It’s an identity claim, and identity doesn’t survive relocation.

The counterexamples make the point. When brands have been caught manufacturing in lower-cost regions and disguising it — a practice that periodically surfaces in Italian fashion supply chains — the reputational damage is severe and immediate. The anti-law holds because provenance isn’t a marketing claim. It’s the foundation of trust.

The ones under pressure

Don’t sell on the internet

Anti-law twenty-four. In 2009, this was almost self-evident. E-commerce felt incompatible with luxury — the experience was transactional, the environment undifferentiated, the ease of purchase at odds with the carefully controlled access that luxury depends on.

Seventeen years later, this is the most visibly challenged anti-law. But the challenge is more interesting than “the internet won, luxury lost.” What happened is that platforms tried to apply mass e-commerce logic — aggregation, convenience, algorithmic discovery — to luxury, and the market systematically destroyed them.

Farfetch went from a twenty-three billion dollar peak valuation in 2021 to a fire-sale acquisition by Coupang for five hundred million in late 2023.³ Richemont took a 1.3 billion euro writedown to offload YNAP (NET-A-PORTER, MR PORTER) to Mytheresa. SSENSE, valued at four billion dollars when Sequoia invested in 2021, filed for creditor protection in August 2025.

The pattern is consistent. Multi-brand luxury e-commerce — the department-store model translated to digital — doesn’t work. It strips away the controlled environment, the scarcity cues, the friction that luxury depends on. When a Bottega Veneta bag sits next to a Balenciaga bag on the same product grid, sorted by price, both brands lose.

But the spirit of the anti-law now matters more than the letter. You must have a digital presence. Hermes sells online — through its own channels, on its own terms, with its own experience design. The product imagery, the editorial content, the deliberate absence of discounting or urgency cues all replicate the in-store philosophy. Wajer’s new website is another example — probably the closest you can get to experiencing the brand and the product when the alternative, being on one of our yachts in the Mediterranean, isn’t available. It’s not an e-commerce site. It’s our brand, translated to a screen with no compromise. Digital as concierge, not marketplace. The anti-law isn’t “don’t use the internet.” It’s “don’t surrender control of the experience.” That formulation is more relevant than ever.

Advertising is not to sell — and communicate to those you’re not targeting

Anti-laws nine and ten are connected. Nine says luxury advertising exists to build the dream, not to drive conversion. Ten says you should communicate to people who will never buy the product, because their admiration sustains the brand’s social value for those who do.

Both principles assumed a clear boundary between the target audience and the aspiration audience. Luxury advertising appeared in specific magazines, at specific events, in specific media. The people who saw it were either buyers or admirers, and the brand controlled which was which.

Social media collapsed that boundary. Everyone sees everything. A fifteen-year-old on TikTok has the same access to brand content as a private client. The “communicate to those you’re not targeting” principle was always true — you want broad awareness — but the mechanism has changed completely. You used to broadcast aspiration through curated channels. Now you broadcast to an undifferentiated audience that includes people who will make dupes of your product, mock your prices, and create parasocial relationships with your brand that you never intended.

The question is whether wider, uncontrolled awareness helps or hurts. The data is ambiguous. Miu Miu grew ninety-three percent in 2024, partly because it became a TikTok phenomenon.⁴ But Miu Miu’s virality was a by-product of a strong creative vision, not a strategy to court the platform. The brand didn’t chase TikTok. TikTok found the brand. That distinction matters enormously, and it’s exactly the distinction the anti-laws are trying to protect.

I managed brand social accounts for long enough to know the pressure. Every platform incentivizes engagement — comments, shares, reactions. The metrics reward accessibility. But luxury depends on a certain distance, a gap between the brand and the audience that creates desire. Every “relatable” post, every meme format, every attempt to “join the conversation” narrows that gap. The anti-laws don’t tell you to ignore social media. They tell you to remember what the distance is for.

Keep stars out of your advertising

Anti-law sixteen. The brand should be the star. Using celebrities implies the brand needs their status, which reverses the power dynamic — the brand should be courted by stars, not dependent on them.

This one is nearly impossible to follow literally in 2026. Celebrity and influencer partnerships are structurally embedded in luxury marketing. Ambassador contracts run to eight and nine figures. The industry has moved too far down this road to reverse course.

But the underlying principle — that the brand must be the source of cultural authority, not a borrower of it — still separates the strong from the weak. Hermes doesn’t use ambassadors. It doesn’t need to. The brand generates its own cultural gravity. Brunello Cucinelli, which grew twelve percent in 2024 to 1.28 billion euros while much of the sector contracted, operates the same way — the founder is the brand’s public figure, but his role is closer to auteur than ambassador.⁵

Compare this to brands that cycle through celebrity partnerships every season, renting relevance rather than building it. When the celebrity moves on — or, worse, becomes a liability — the brand is left without the borrowed equity it was relying on. The anti-law, read as a strategic principle rather than a tactical prohibition, remains sound: if you need a famous face to make people care about your product, the product isn’t doing its job. At both Spyker and Wajer, I was lucky to work with some high-profile customers — people who bought the product because they loved it and wanted to invest in it. That’s the only way it works. The celebrity association comes from genuine ownership, not a contract. The power dynamic stays where it should be.

The deeper question

Reading back through these seven, I notice a pattern. The anti-laws that hold unconditionally — positioning, customer deference, scarcity, provenance — are the ones rooted in what luxury is. They describe the philosophical foundations: identity over comparison, vision over demand, place over efficiency. These don’t change because the nature of luxury hasn’t changed. It’s still about creating objects and experiences whose value comes from something other than utility.

The anti-laws under pressure — internet sales, advertising channels, celebrity — are the ones about how luxury reaches people. These are infrastructure questions, and infrastructure changes. The internet exists. Social media exists. Celebrity culture has metastasized. You can’t pretend otherwise. But the brands that thrive are the ones that adapt the execution while preserving the philosophy.

The numbers from 2024 make this case starkly. Bain reported that the personal luxury market contracted for the first time in fifteen years, losing some fifty million customers over two years.⁶ Only a third of brands posted positive growth. The brands that grew — Hermes, Brunello Cucinelli, Miu Miu — are the ones that live the anti-law philosophy even while making practical concessions to the modern landscape. The brands that struggled — Gucci most visibly, but also Burberry, which has undergone serial creative director changes and strategic pivots — are the ones that broke the spirit, not just the letter.

Kapferer and Bastien published a third edition in 2025 that addresses AI, sustainability, and the “luxification of society.” I haven’t read it yet, but the fact that the framework is still being updated — and that the core anti-laws remain intact while new chapters are added — suggests the authors see the same pattern I do. The principles are durable. The applications evolve.

The book taught me, before I had the experience to fully absorb it, that a brand is something you protect, not just something you promote. That the instinct to do more, reach more people, satisfy more demand, say yes to more opportunities — the instinct that drives most marketing careers — is precisely what luxury needs to resist. Not everything. Not always. But the default should be restraint, and every deviation from restraint should be deliberate and justified.

Compass, not GPS

The copy of The Luxury Strategy that I bought before my studies at EURIB is still on the shelf. It has become a reference work — one of the few books I return to rather than just remember. The book has been a reference point for fifteen years, not because I follow every anti-law literally, but because the framework gives me a way to evaluate decisions. When a proposal comes across my desk — a new channel, a partnership, a campaign concept — I can run it against the anti-laws and at least know which principles I’m upholding and which I’m compromising.

That’s what a good framework does. It doesn’t make decisions for you. It makes the trade-offs visible. The anti-laws are a compass, not a GPS. They point a direction, not a route. Marketing changes constantly — the channels, the tools, the platforms, the metrics. The principles beneath it change slowly, if at all. The brands that understand this distinction are the ones still standing. The ones that confused the compass for the terrain are the ones writing down assets and looking for new creative directors.

Seventeen years is a long time in marketing. It’s nothing in luxury. That asymmetry is the whole point.