All 2 entries tagged Global

What is Luxury in a Globally Mediated World?

Researching the concept of luxury in action

Our industry tutors Sara Lattey and Sandy Bradley are currently working with MA Global Media and Communications students on a specific luxury travel-related Applied Communication Project brief this Summer Term 2014 and this has given us all a great opportunity to study the concept of luxury as background research: what it is; the people who seek luxury and aspire to embrace luxury in their lives; and those for whom luxury is the norm. Below they reflect upon what they have discovered so far and their visit with some MA Global Media and Communications students to the Four Seasons Hotel in Hampshire.

The study has involved comparisons of luxury brands, immersive research into how some of those brands position themselves and how they reach out to, and cater for the people who buy into them.

One of the several definitions of luxury is ‘A pleasure obtained only rarely’, whereas others include ‘An inessential, desirable item which is expensive or difficult to obtain’ or ‘A state of great comfort or elegance, especially when involving great expense’.

For us, this raised a number a questions.

If luxury is defined as a rare treat, then how do the uber-wealthy who live their lives in a state of permanent luxury define the word? What lengths do they go to in order to create a state of ‘beyond luxury’ where it is still a ‘pleasure obtained rarely’ but still way, way beyond the reach of most of us?

And how do luxury brands go the extra mile for those who seek them out?

A global luxury brand that particularly interested us was the Toronto-based hotel management group Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts and a field trip was arranged to conduct observational research at Four Seasons Hampshire UK.

Four Seasons’ current brand mantra is Extraordinary Experiences, a promise that they keep in all their establishments, worldwide – offering authentic, local experiences for the wealthy traveller wherever they may be…..seeing how the locals live, but with the safety net and brand reassurance of Four Seasons. The sky is the limit (literally), with their latest offering being a round-the-world tour in a private jet stopping at Four Seasons hotels wherever they land – at a cost of £75,000 pp.

Four Seasons’ Hampshire did not disappoint and provided fascinating insight into their approach and how they interpret the Extraordinary Experiences brand ethic in the heart of the Hampshire countryside. In an idyllic location surrounded by small villages and thatched cottages, they have the perfect opportunity to offer the ‘typical English country house experience’ – with as many associated bells and whistles as their guests are prepared to pay for: an impressive state-of-the-art equestrian centre, huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’ within the massive estate housing the original, now-extended Georgian residence, a canal boat on their own stretch of canal, their own ducks and chickens, sheep and goats, with a finger-on-the-button concierge service that can arrange just about anything a guest requires; from men’s final Wimbledon tickets to ‘hitherto full-house’ London West End theatre tickets. An extensive spa and fitness centre offers a mouth-watering array of treatments – including facials at £500. They even have their own perfectly-trained pet Labrador called Oliver….who roams freely in designated areas of the hotel…. to the delight of guests.

With suites costing between £1,000 and £3,000 per night (not including breakfast), their guests rarely have to worry about the cost of anything they need…..this is luxury.

Members of staff are rigorously trained in absolute discretion, but interestingly – not deference. Famous names are never revealed….but everyone is treated politely and in a friendly manner but with top quality service. They have a simple philosophy for interaction with guests: 'Treating guests as peers - neither subservient nor aloof'. It seems to work. Guests come here to relax – and retreat from the stresses that come from managing their wealth. They return time and time again….trust is paramount.

For our research visit (humble students from the University of Warwick!) they went to as much trouble as if we had been royalty. A guided tour, meeting key members of staff and seeing both ‘front of house’ and ‘heart of house’ ( their wonderful name for the service areas), we were served a fabulous array of cakes and pastries with coffee with a ‘hand-crafted from icing ‘ University of Warwick logo as the centrepiece….all produced by the pastry chef. ‘It’s simply what we do’ shrugged our guide as we gasped at the work involved.

The concept of luxury is not new. It is many centuries old. Wealthy people have always craved the unique, the special, the generally unattainable….and would delight in collecting the work of popular, skilled artisans of the day as a physical expression and demonstration of their wealth and status. (Indeed, as the new world opened and global trade developed, wealthy merchants would increasingly trade objects from distant lands.) Intricate carvings, precious gems and metals and the finest fabrics were all desirable to those who could afford such luxury.

Interestingly, it was the artisans themselves who created such exquisite work who subsequently rose to become a ‘nouveau riche’ in their own right as their popularity spread. Thus began a symbiotic relationship between the creators of original work and the purchasers….each pushing the other acquire to bigger, better and more unique possessions.

Was this the beginning of the luxury brand? The principles remain the same today.

The students’ study continues and some of them attended the Leverhulme Luxury Networkas part of their research.

Joanne Garde-Hansen : 25 Jun 2014 16:13 |  Tags: Communications Four Global Luxury Media Seasons |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Memes, spam, nodes and moods: Dr Tony D. Sampson on creating super–clusters of attention

The GMC course welcomed visiting researcher – Dr Tony D. Sampson, Reader in Digital Culture at the University of East London, co-editor with Jussi Parikka of The Spam Book: On Viruses, Porn and Other Anomalies from the Dark Side of Digital Culture (2009) and author of a new book Virality: Contagion Theory in the Age of Networks (2012). Our postgraduates got to grips with some new and challenging critical thinking around neuro-culture, attentional marketing, global protest and crowds, contagion on and offline, ‘pass on power’ and the vulnerabilities built into robust networks. Sampson was adept at drawing together a wide and inter-disciplinary range of theories and methodological thinking to create a new framework for tackling the ways in which the social is made and assembled in our increasingly attention-capturing economies. From Tarde, Bergson and Baran to Deleuze, Foucault and Stiegler, Sampson took us on a journey through difficult terrain to show us how propositions such as ‘nudge’ theory, geographies of mood, meme marketing and happenstance viralities emerge and gain ground both in terms of business strategies and political discourse. Our postgraduates come from 19 different countries and bring with them a wealth of experience of working and living in communications and media landscapes, ecologies and environments that are increasingly connected to each other. Sampson was able to explore succinctly the centralised, decentralised and distributed networks of communication (Baran) that afford (or not) connectivity, allowing us to reflect upon our local experiences.

Fundamentally, Sampson asked us to understand the social as never given but always being made and this allowed us to reflect upon our roles, agency and activities in that making of the social. At the same time, Sampson highlighted the different ways in which hierarchies of networks are produced: super clusters and super nodes of attention that produce aristocratic networks that may look more like a decentralized network than the distributed vision that cyberculture theory may have promised us in the 1990s. Oprah Winfrey was a good example of a super node! The GMC postgraduates come from a variety of different experiences of communications histories and practices that do not always follow these patterns of development, so it will be interesting to see what they find applicable in their own local contexts.

Sampson’s presentation of his new thinking allowed us the time to unpack his ideas on virality and digital contagion which was useful for engaging in the areas we are studying: spreadability of media, the politics of fear and anxiety around online culture, the attention economies many of our students have been, are, or will be employed within, and our own desire to tackle inequalities through new communication paradigms. Our students were interested in Sampson’s take on web analytics, how the arts and sciences can work together on these issues, and whether we should continue to fight for a distributed network. There were lots of references to Nigel Thrift’s work in the session and the students learned a good deal about the relationship between media, emotion, affect and the biological. We all went away wondering whether we were sleep-walking our way through the spreadability of media content or whether we were awake and alert to what Sampson defined as the ‘mechanisms of capture.’ For more on Dr Tony D. Sampson’s work then visit his blog.

Joanne Garde-Hansen : 15 Oct 2013 20:19 |  Tags: Contagion Culture Digital Global Media Spam Virality |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem