Apparently people are exhausted with luxury. Well maybe not exhausted, but fatigued, if the thought leaders are to be believed anyway.
Perhaps the trick with luxury fatigue is to stop treating it as an economic mystery and start seeing it as a very ordinary human response, the sort you notice every time a train company believes the answer to delays is more announcements. There’s a point where information becomes noise, noise becomes irritation, and irritation becomes avoidance.
You could argue luxury fatigue isn’t about taste changing at all, it’s simply the moment when the consumer’s cognitive bandwidth throws up its hands and says, “for the love of Cher, no more”. The industry has spent years behaving like someone repeatedly nudging you on the shoulder to remind you how exclusive they are.
Psychologically, that’s not a great cue for desire, but it does tend to be a fabulous cue for disengagement. Humans aren’t wired to process constant novelty with equal enthusiasm.
Novelty floods the reward system early on, but the dopamine arc collapses rapidly when the stimulus becomes predictable. Which is exactly what happens when every brand releases a “rare” collection every other Tuesday.
If anything, the only brands that dodge fatigue are the ones that behave as though they’ve never heard of marketing calendars at all. They operate on an entirely different rhythm, a sort of slow luxury circadian cycle.
And this triggers something quite powerful, because waiting engages anticipatory reward, a system the brain finds suspiciously pleasurable. Scarcity isn’t just a commercial tactic, it’s a psychological one. Remove it and the whole structure slumps.
The amusing thing is that luxury fatigue has been blamed on consumers, as though they’ve become fickle or ungrateful.
In reality they’re responding exactly as psychology predicts. When signals become inconsistent, when cues of rarity are over-broadcast, when brands demand too much attention too often, people step back.
Not usually out of rebellion but more out of conservation, it’s about saving cognitive effort in a similar manner that we save our best biscuits or best Scotch for company. Well some people do, I’ve never been a huge advocate for denying myself.
It becomes even more absurd when you notice how many brands treat attention as a kind of KPI of existential importance.
Visibility has to everywhere and all the time.
Yet behavioural economics has been gently pointing out for years that attention is not the same as persuasion. It’s sometimes the opposite. Make something too visible and you strip it of its mystique. It’s the luxury equivalent of placing a velvet rope around a packet of custard creams. People notice, yes, but they don’t necessarily respect it.
Luxury fatigue is, in many ways, the market’s behavioural correction. A nudge back toward brands that know how to hold their nerve, avoid the temptation to shout, and trust that desire grows in the gaps rather than the floodlights.
And if the sector insists on treating desire as a volume game, customers will continue doing the one thing luxury marketers always forget they can do. They’ll look away.
See you next week
Paul
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