The importance of dream in advertising: luxury versus mass market

Luxury companies typically follow managerial approaches that differ from those of mass market companies and, in particular, their marketing strategies are based on opposite tactics. For instance, luxury companies commonly use imagery rather than text in their print advertising as a way of allowing customers to assign their own personal meanings to the message, thus fulfilling their desire to dream. Indeed, in this current era of information proliferation, today’s consumers are increasingly less willing to process advertising information they receive as text. In this study we explore luxury communication by analyzing some luxury brands’ print advertisement and showing how luxury companies mainly communicate through images instead of text, thus creating appealing advertisements. On the basis of those results and some literature insights, we formulate some managerial propositions that mass market companies may use to start developing dream-evoking communication in order to appeal to modern consumers. In particular, we present mass market managers with suggestions about how to employ the luxury model to make their communications more aspirational than rational through imagery rather than text.