Zerodha's Nikhil Kamath On Ultra-Luxury Brands And Their 'Strategy Of Being Arrogant' (Image: youtube.com)
Zerodha”s Nikhil Kamath says that he has stopped buying ultra-luxury brands. He explains the ‘why’ of this in his podcast “WTF is with Nikhil Kamath”. The episode has been titled “WTF Goes into Building a Fashion, Beauty, or Home Brand?”. The reason he has attributed to this lies in the ‘strategy of being arrogant,’ the Zerodha Co-Founder said.
The podcast began with the talk of consumption “dropping down” across segments, where each of the guests would talk of “totally different insight into consumption,” he further went on to hand the talk to the guests. The talks revolved around brand building. The Guests were, Kishore Biyani of Future Group; Raj Shamani, content creator and podcaster; and Ananth Narayanan, who is the founder of Mensa Brands and former CEO of Myntra.
In the talk, India’s youngest billionaire, Nikhil Kamath said that, he no longer buys ultra-luxury brands now as he views the marketing strategies of such brands as arrogance. He said this in his latest episode of his podcast, ‘WTF Goes into Building a Fashion, Beauty, or Home Brand?’. He explained that the ultra-luxury brands deliberately makes the customer build a relationship as a part of their strategy of being arrogant which has served the brands well, while they can make a million of their products, it is not that they cant.
“In the last 3-4 years, I have completely stopped buying from ultra luxury brands like Hermes and Louis Vuitton because I feel they play you. Their entire marketing strategy seems to be to offend and get some kind of a reaction out of you and then buy from them. The most offensive thing is to go to a shop where they are marking up a product one is to 1,000 times and then say you can”t buy this product until you build a relationship with us or get on a list or all of these hoops that you have to jump through,” said Nikhil Kamath.
He further said that, “it is not because they can”t manufacture more of that…they can go make a million of these bags and stuff but that strategy of being arrogant has worked so well for them that I think people have to be cognizant of that.”
Kishore Biyani, the founder of Future Group who spoke about the differences on the approaches to his business with Big Bazar and ultra-luxury brands. He said that Big Bazaar was structured on base of – fear, greed and altruism, explaining that “greed’ being that the products are available at lower prices and ‘fear’ being that the product may not be available always. He added that ultra-luxury brands were structured on appealing to the ego and vanity.
The podcast spoke of fashion beauty or a home brand, as to how to scale them to hundred crore and beyond. The episode stood for three and a half hours. The podcast has guests speaking on many interesting topics such as brand names, logos, community building, SEO, and marketplace strategies.
