Decoding the New Tiffany
This week, a Tiffany campaign featuring Beyoncé, Jay-Z, a Basquiat painting and a 128.54-carat diamond offered a window into how LVMH is bringing its playbook to its largest-ever acquisition and the advantages and challenges of marketing brands rooted in the 19th century in today’s world.
After a leadership reshuffle that put Anthony Ledru, Alexandre Arnault and Michael Burke in the driver’s seat, Tiffany hit the market last month with advertising that screamed “Not Your Mother’s Tiffany.” The rebranding accelerated this week, when the jeweller launched a campaign featuring superstar couple Beyoncé and Jay-Z, a Jean-Michel Basquiat painting and the 128.54-carat Tiffany Diamond, one of the largest yellow diamonds ever discovered.
Internet mentions spiked, but sentiment was divided.
In the US, Tiffany’s largest market, some saw the bejeweled Black power couple, photographed alongside a painting by Basquiat, whose work often addresses racism and class struggle, as a celebration of a New American Dream, no less defined by material wealth but freshly attainable to those long relegated to the bottom of the country’s socio-economic hierarchy. In this reading, Beyoncé becoming the fourth woman in the world (and the first Black woman) to ever wear the $30-million Tiffany Diamond was a symbol of empowerment.
Others saw a troubling depiction of Black Aristocracy defined by adjacency to whiteness spiked with the troubled history of colonialism, pointing primarily to the spectacle of Beyoncé refashioned as Audrey Hepburn in the film “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” while wearing a gemstone unearthed in South Africa in 1877. “Her brown skin reflects the light instead of Hepburn’s ivory complexion. The enormous diamond, freighted with the history of colonialism, hangs around a Black woman’s neck,” wrote Robin Givhan in the Washington Post.
Seen through a business lens, the Tiffany campaign was most interesting as a window into how LVMH is bringing its playbook for rebooting heritage labels to its largest-ever acquisition and the advantages and challenges of marketing brands rooted in the 19th century in today’s world.
Heritage is undoubtedly a powerful brand asset, especially when combined with a modern sensibility. LVMH has developed one of the most successful playbooks in the luxury sector with a strategy focused on modernising dusty labels, most notably with its high fashion revamp of luggage-maker Louis Vuitton, now the group’s cash cow, under designer Marc Jacobs.
Per the approach, the strongest luxury brands are both timeless and contemporary, able to lean on a unique backstory, often with alluring Old World associations from artisanal craftsmanship to aristocratic clients, while simultaneously tapping the current zeitgeist. In short, they are both classy and cool, a combination that gives them powerful sociocultural value and serves to differentiate them in the market beyond quality materials and design, with price tags to match.
Tiffany has a powerful history, but in recent decades the brand has been neither classy nor cool in the eyes of consumers. It needs to simultaneously reassert its heritage and connect with today’s cultural moment. Enter a campaign that features no saleable product, but where each element has a vital part to play in rescripting Tiffany’s brand story to do just that.
The 128.54-carat Tiffany Diamond plays a star role, its provenance and size underscoring Tiffany’s 184-year-old heritage as a high-jewellery house. Meanwhile, the Basquiat painting, a rarely seen work from 1982 whose dominant colour closely resembles Tiffany’s signature robin’s-egg blue, serves as a kind of cultural bridge between the past and the present.
So do Beyoncé and Jay-Z, whose hair style resembles Basquiat’s dreadlocks. They are the archetypical contemporary power couple — strong and equally successful, but by no means immune to the ups and downs of relationships — whose appearance in the campaign helps to modernise the concepts of love and marriage to which the Tiffany brand is so closely associated. But they may also be the closest thing America has to royalty and appear in black evening wear that, in the case of Beyoncé, is a direct reference to Golden Age actress Hepburn.
The mix of history and the current zeitgeist is potent.
But what happens when heritage brands, often rooted in the 19th century, come with historical associations that may be uncomfortable for 21st century eyes and ears? As critics have pointed out, the diamond that stars in Tiffany’s campaign was mined in colonial Africa.
It’s hard to hold companies responsible for what happened in past centuries. But it’s in their own interests for brands to be careful with how they deploy their heritage stories today, when politics is so deeply embedded in the daily conversation and winning over social media commentators, whose posts can powerfully shape consumer perception, is not always easy.
The issue is by no means unique to Tiffany. In today’s politically charged, social media-driven landscape, it’s increasingly clear that brand heritage can come with liabilities as well as advantages.