Is it a good thing if your brand looks premium?

There's a piece of brand strategy advice I’ll be shouting forevermore: your brand doesn't need to look luxurious. In fact, sometimes a luxurious look is exactly what's killing your sales.

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The hill I will die on

I will probably be fighting about this until the day I die: your price brand matters. A lot of flashy marketing agencies skew toward luxury by default. They push clients toward a high-end, exclusive, slightly inaccessible look, assuming that's what makes a website visitor want the product. The problem is, it’s a strategy that doesn't actually work.

Where "price brand" comes from

The term isn't mine, I just love it. It was coined by Ken Roberts, founder of Forethought, a marketing advisory firm based in Australia. 

His most compelling piece of evidence: in his research, people were more likely to buy from Walmart than from Amazon or Target simply because Walmart has a lower price brand. Even when the items they were buying were actually more expensive at Walmart!

Brand matters. Luxury is optional.

That research proves something important: brand genuinely matters and genuinely affects everyone — but brand doesn't have to mean high-end, premium, or luxury to be effective. 

Unfortunately, when design students learn about brand, they often approach it from a purely aesthetic perspective: the more beautiful, the more likely it is to sell. But that simply isn't true! What matters is whether the look matches the price brand: the consumer's perception of how much your brand costs.

Can you just "make" a brand luxury?

Rome wasn't built in a day; neither is your brand. Fact: I could make a stunning brand tomorrow, put up the most luxurious-looking website, have gorgeous trench coats made, and sell them at $2,500 a pop. 

But no matter how convincing it all looks, it won't be Burberry — because it isn't Burberry. 

Time (a lot of it!), quality, community, cult followings, charisma, belief: these are the intangibles that make a luxury brand earn its stripes. 

Want to build your own luxury brand? Go for it. Just give it 100 years.

"So you're saying I can't control my own brand, Rivkie?"

Yes! That's exactly what I'm saying. 

Brand is perception — how people perceive your company. If you think you can simply "rebrand," change how things look visually, and watch people completely change their minds about who your brand is and what it does, I've got an overpriced trench coat to sell you.

Two strategies:

1. If people's perception of your brand is different from what you want or need it to be, you can change it — slowly, persuasively, over time. 
2. Or you can lean into the perception that already exists, find the target audience who appreciates your price brand (they're the ones saying, "Yes! I would like to buy what you're selling, for the amount of money I think you're selling it for"), and market the heck out of your product to them. If you're Walmart, be Walmart. If you're Burberry, be Burberry.

How this played out with Peerstar

When we rebranded Peerstar, we ran into exactly this. We could have made a more modern, sleeker brand. We could have used a more polished photography style. We could have gone with trendier colors. We very intentionally chose not to.

The old brand didn't match people's perception; it was too cold and institutional. We were speaking to rural Pennsylvanians. They don't want corporate. They want authentic. And if it looks "expensive" in any way? Forget it. 

Even though they weren't paying for a product per se, the price brand needed to match our target audience and the brand perception that already existed. So that's what we leaned into.

We saw the same thing with RTA Wood Cabinets, from the opposite direction: the rebrand had to signal "great value," which meant more low-price messaging, and more high-quality visual cues. Subtle work, deliberately un-fancy, but more polished than what they had before — and bingo! A very successful website relaunch. 

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No luxury trench coats were harmed in the writing of this post.

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