Insights

• Every serious luxury hotel now has a wellness programme. Most have spas, sleep rituals, longevity menus, and in-house experts offering experiences like sound baths, champagne yoga, and mindfulness retreats. Yet, this is exactly why wellness by itself is not a major differentiator anymore.

• The brands that approach wellness holistically as a core narrative expression of brand DNA across operations, storytelling, and experience design are in a league all their own. They are able to build the narrative and operational systems required to translate and refine that definition across every touchpoint.

• The differentiated way that hospitality brands deliver wellness experiences is reflected in our IWT Global Luxury Hospitality Content Effectiveness Index (HCEI) results, which evaluate luxury hospitality brands across three core dimensions: digital experience, narrative marketing, and audience clarity. We put Aman at the top of the table.

• What Aman demonstrates is that wellness, at the highest level, is not built by expanding programmes or adding layers of expertise. It is built by defining a point of view and ensuring that every element—environment, service, pacing, and offering—supports that definition over time.

In Simon Sinek’s introduction to Guidara’s Unreasonable Hospitality, he notes the book’s overriding thesis: “[G]reat service cannot exist without great leadership.” While the book covers a lot of ground, Guidara consistently argues that acts of service are inherently human and humane, improving business operations and outcomes while at the same time making experiences and, in turn, the world a better, kinder place.

The idea of acts of service may seem an unusual lens through which to look at the growing focus on wellness within hospitality. Yet, it is in fact critical to how luxury hospitality creates, frames, and builds its wellness narrative within its own ecosystem as well as to the global luxury market as a whole.

In a luxury context, “wellness” equates to a host of related and unrelated concepts that hospitality brands have to deal with, ranging from food, health, and beauty initiatives to deeper, more systematic experiential immersion. This complex web of definitions means that luxury hospitality brands need a defined vocabulary and strategy for how they talk about and approach wellness within their own brands; but also they need to invest in an overarching narrative strategy to drive consistency and clarity about wellness and wellness storytelling across brand content and communications, guest experience, and internal operations.

For a practical take, we explore these ideas through brief but focused case studies on the different ways in which Aman builds holistic, culturally contextualised worlds around wellness that seep through their guest experience and operations to varying degrees of success. This analysis draws on the inaugural It’s A Working Title Content Effectiveness Index (CEI) for hospitality, which evaluates luxury brands based on narrative coherence, experience design, and audience clarity.

The Deep Well of the Wellness Narrative

Every serious luxury hotel now has a wellness programme. Most have spas, sleep rituals, longevity menus, and in-house experts offering experiences like sound baths, champagne yoga, and mindfulness retreats. As an amenity category, wellness has more or less been won.

Unfortunately, this is exactly why wellness by itself is not a major differentiator anymore. One look at the data around the sheer explosion in the luxury wellness category reveals why. Wellness is no longer a poor cousin to luxury hospitality; it is one of its main engines of growth. According to the Global Wellness Institute, global wellness tourism alone now represents $651 billion in annual spend with projected growth of 16.6 percent annually through 2027, making it one of the fastest-growing sectors within the global wellness economy.

The difference maker now is not whether a luxury hospitality brand offers wellness, but actually what it means by the term in the first place. Across luxury hospitality, wellness operates as a flexible and often ill-defined concept. For some brands, it signals personal optimisation: longevity, performance, and measurable outcomes. For others, it centres on physical and psycho-social restoration: retreat, recalibration, stillness, and mindful community building. Then for other brands, it becomes full-on experiential immersion, with wellbeing intricately tied to place and environment or to education, with guests being given life frameworks to carry with them home beyond their stay.

Most hospitality brands conceptualise wellness in a way that covers several of these definitions at once. The result is a vague, over-generalised notion of wellness that often contributes to a proliferation of disconnected initiatives without a clear narrative point of view.

The brands that approach wellness holistically as a core narrative expression of brand DNA across operations, storytelling, and experience design are in a league all their own. They are not only defining what wellness means within their world but also what it does not mean. From there, they are able to build the narrative and operational systems required to translate and refine that definition across every touchpoint.

It is in this strategic narrative approach that wellness shifts from amenity to a narrative brand system. And it is also where acts of service move from a function of operations to a central mechanism through which wellness is delivered and experienced.

Acts of Service as the Operating Logic of Wellness

If acts of service shape how wellness is experienced, the question is how it shows up in practice. This is where Guidara’s framing of hospitality as a series of acts of service becomes useful, not because it elevates service as performance, but because it treats it as a way of thinking. Acts of service are about recognising what a guest needs, usually before they articulate it, and delivering it in a way that feels natural rather than orchestrated.

In a wellness context, most hospitality brands focus on what they offer—treatments, programmes, experts, and experiences—rather than how those offerings are actually experienced and what they signal about the brand as a whole. From a guest perspective, however, wellness is rarely defined by a single offering. It is defined by how the entire stay feels and how much friction has been removed along the way.

Two hotels may offer similar spa menus or longevity programmes, but the experience can feel entirely different depending on how those elements are organised. In one case, the stay feels like a connected whole. In another, it feels like a series of well-designed but separate offerings.

This divergence in how hospitality brands deliver wellness experiences is reflected in our IWT Global Luxury Hospitality Content Effectiveness Index (HCEI) results, which evaluate luxury hospitality brands across three core dimensions: digital experience, narrative marketing, and audience clarity.

What the index makes visible is not simply how brands approach wellness, but how they structure experience more broadly. Performance does not track with the volume of offerings, whether in wellness, dining, programming, or service, but with how clearly those elements are defined and how consistently they are carried across the guest journey.

High-performing brands are clear about what they stand for and carry that through the entire experience. This is often visible in how a property is designed, how staff interact with guests, how programmes are framed, and how the brand communicates across its website and booking journey. These elements reinforce one another, so the stay feels consistent from start to finish.

Lower-performing brands tend to take a more additive approach. They introduce new programmes, expand wellness offerings, and layer in expertise, but without fully connecting those elements back to a clear point of view. The result is an experience that looks comprehensive, but feels uneven in practice—shifting between different tones, priorities, and ways of engaging the guest.

Wellness makes this difference easy to spot because it cuts across so many parts of the experience. It shows up in the spa, in-room amenities, food and beverage, programming, and increasingly in how the brand presents itself digitally. In top-performing brands on the HCEI, these elements are aligned. A treatment, a menu, and a piece of content all reflect the same underlying idea of what wellness means. In lower-performing brands, all these elements can feel loosely related, well-executed on their own, but not clearly part of the same experience.

Aman offers a clear example of how this works in practice, approaching wellness with a level of cohesion and control that sets it apart from its peers.

Aman: A System of Care

Aman did not arrive at its approach to wellness by simply expanding into the category. From its founding in 1988 by Adrian Zecha, the brand was built around a different premise: that the hotel experience itself should function as a form of retreat. Its early properties such as Amanpuri in Phuket established a model centred on space, privacy, and a deep sense of place, with architecture, service, and experience designed and paced to shape and control how a guest feels upon arrival.

In this context, wellness at Aman was never introduced as a separate offering. It emerged as a natural extension of the brand’s foundational vision. As the brand expanded, Aman continued to develop spas, retreats, and more formalised programmes. But, all of these were layered into an already coherent experience rather than just added to it as yet another amentiy.

On the Aman website, this approach remains visible. Wellness is present but not over-articulated. Guests are offered spa houses, curated retreats, and tailored programmes. But, these are framed as part of a broader environment of sanctuary rather than as discrete, outcome-driven interventions. This same philosophy has been carried into the brand’s digital experience, developed in partnership with Matter Of Form, where clarity, restraint, and continuity shape how guests engage with the brand before they arrive. The emphasis within the narrative of wellness remains on the overall experience rather than on individual components.

This holistic wellness positioning carries through to the Aman in-person stay. The experience is designed to feel continuous, with measured and unobtrusive staff interactions and intuitive movement through the property. There is no clear distinction between “wellness activities” and the rest of the stay; everything has a sinuous look and feel, operating at the same level of calm, control, and attention.

At Aman, acts of service are what make this possible. Service is used to integrate the experience rather than to punctuate it, with needs anticipated, timing carefully managed, and transitions smoothed out before they are noticed. The guest is not asked to make frequent decisions or engage with multiple frameworks, allowing the experience to unfold without interruption.

In practice, this creates a genuinely systemic form of wellness:

• Wellness is embedded across the entire stay. At properties such as Amangiri, the physical environment—open desert landscapes, minimal architecture, and controlled sightlines—works in tandem with spa programming and service pacing to create a continuous sense of stillness rather than a sequence of activities

• Programmes support the system, rather than define it. Offerings such as the Aman New York Spa Houses or multi-day retreats are expansive, but they are framed as extensions of the environment, with no expectation that the guest must complete a programme or achieve a defined outcome

• Service connects every touchpoint. Staff interactions are intentionally minimal and precisely timed, from arrival rituals to in-room dining and spa transitions, creating continuity without requiring instruction or intervention

• The guest experiences coherence without needing explanation. There is no initial screening, prescribed pathway, or structured wellness plan; the experience unfolds without requiring the guest to interpret or assemble it

This consistency is not incidental. It is the result of a deliberate approach that begins with a clear definition of what the experience should feel like and extends through every operational and design decision. Aman’s performance at the top of the index is therefore not driven by the visibility of its wellness offering, but by how completely that offering has been absorbed into the structure of the experience itself.

What Aman demonstrates is that wellness, at the highest level, is not built by expanding programmes or adding layers of expertise. It is built by defining a point of view and ensuring that every element—environment, service, pacing, and offering—supports that definition over time.

In this model, acts of service are not a supporting layer but the mechanism that holds the experience together. They connect spaces, shape transitions, and remove the need for the guest to navigate the stay as a series of choices, allowing the experience to remain continuous from arrival to departure.

The result is a form of wellness that does not need to be explained in order to be understood, because it is coherent in how it is delivered. It is holistic not as a claim, but as a consequence of how the experience has been built.

Wellness as Narrative System

What Aman makes clear is that the question for luxury hospitality is no longer whether to invest in wellness. It is how to define it and how to carry that definition consistently and holistically throughout the ecperience, attenuated to every touchpoint.

Across the global hosptiality market, there is no shortage of high-quality wellness experiences: expansive spas, expert-led programmes, thoughtful design, and attentive service. Yet, at many luxury hotels, these elements often sit alongside one another rather than working together, resulting in experiences that feel considered in parts but unresolved as a whole.

Aman offers a different model. Wellness is not positioned as a category within the experience, nor even as a set of programmes to be navigated. It is embedded from the outset and reinforced through acts of service that connect each moment to the next, shaping how the guest moves through the space, how time is structured, and how the experience unfolds.

In this sense, wellness functions not as an offering, but as a narrative system. It defines how the experience is organised and how meaning is carried across it.

The implication for luxury hospitality brands is straightforward. Differentiation will not come from expanding the scope of wellness or increasing the number of programmes. It will come from making deliberate choices about what wellness means within the brand and building the experience to hold that definition with precision over time.

Insights

• We present three simulations of luxury industry performance (base, optimistic, pessimistic) to capture how geopolitical risk and shifting macro conditions are widening the range of possible outcomes for discretionary demand, rather than pointing to a single recovery path.

• While the sector has exited its downturn after a period of contraction driven by weak China demand and pricing pressures, the recovery is uneven and increasingly dependent on macro conditions, with growth returning across scenarios but varying meaningfully based on China, global growth, and financial conditions.

• In this more volatile and dispersed environment, execution becomes a key differentiator, with brands needing stronger, more scalable content strategy and operations to localise effectively, engage consumers, and build resilience as demand becomes more fragmented and less predictable.

Geopolitical Economics is Driving Widely Diverging Prospects for Luxury

The waves of political and economic risk continue. Some of the near-term risks, such as slowing cyclical demand for premium and luxury goods in response to aggressive price hikes of the past few years, have been easy to forecast. Others, such as iterations of disruption to global trade policy and geopolitical developments, are more difficult.

By and large, luxury sales have held up rather well given the circumstances. After all, demand from the industry’s key growth market, China, remains moribund for many key brands. The industry even exited recession, by our count anyways, in Q4 2025 after six consecutive quarters of negative growth followed by the post-pandemic supercycle.

At the start of the year, we predicted modest, though positive, luxury industry growth this year and into 2027. (See “The Differentiation Economy: Why Narrative Systems Will Define Growth in the AI Era”.) Now, the range of possibilities seems quite a bit wider.

Three Simulations of Luxury Industry Performance in 2026-27

Geopolitical economic developments are driving a wider range of possible outcomes for discretionary spending than we’ve seen in recent years. For a sector so tightly linked to global wealth and sentiment, this matters disproportionately. Against that backdrop, we have used our proprietary sector-specific macro-econometric model to frame three distinct simulations—base, optimistic, and pessimistic—to understand how different macro paths translate into industry performance. For a sector so tightly linked to global wealth and sentiment, this matters disproportionately.

Each scenario is anchored in a coherent macro setup:

1. The base case assumes steady but unspectacular growth: China stabilising in the mid-4% range, the U.S. expanding around trend, energy prices remaining contained, and financial conditions broadly stable.

2. The optimistic case reflects a more supportive environment, with stronger Chinese growth, resilient U.S. demand, easing financial conditions, and lower energy prices reinforcing both confidence and spending.

3. The pessimistic case assumes a more challenging mix: weaker Chinese momentum, softer global growth, higher energy prices, and tighter financial conditions weighing on discretionary demand. Currency moves are incorporated as part of these broader conditions, acting as an additional source of variability in reported results.

The key takeaway is not the precise numbers, but the dispersion across outcomes. The sector has already moved through its downturn—2024 and early 2025 represent the trough—but what follows is not a synchronised rebound. Instead, growth resumes into a much wider range depending on the macro environment. In the base case, the industry settles into a steady mid-to-high single-digit growth trajectory. In the optimistic scenario, stronger macro conditions lift growth into low double digits. In the pessimistic case, growth compresses materially, but importantly, remains positive. That asymmetry is telling: luxury now appears to have a structural floor, but a more limited upside skew than in prior cycles.

China sits at the centre of this dynamic. Across all three simulations, it remains the most important marginal driver—but its role has evolved. The model assumes stabilisation rather than reacceleration, and that distinction matters. Even in a more favourable environment, stronger Chinese growth translates into improvement, not a return to the outsized expansion of the past decade. In a weaker environment, however, softer Chinese demand feeds through quickly into sector growth. The result is a more nonlinear sensitivity, where downside shocks have a larger impact than upside surprises.

The implication is that luxury is transitioning into a more balanced, but more macro-dependent regime. The U.S. provides a stabilising base of demand, China drives variability, and financial conditions—through equities, rates, and currencies—determine how much of that demand converts into growth. The three scenarios make this explicit: the industry is no longer operating in a one-way expansion cycle, but in a range of plausible macro environments with meaningfully different outcomes. For brands and investors alike, the message is clear: luxury remains structurally attractive, but understanding the macro context has become central to understanding the sector itself

Building Market Resilience through Applied Luxury Strategy

The resilience of luxury brands and their ability to flex and adapt for the future in shifting market dynamics should involve a combination of adaptability and long-term strategy. For luxury brands, this directly translates into how they plan, create, manage, and distribute content across and within channels.

The reality is that many luxury brands lack holistic content strategy and scalable content operations infrastructure, even if they have a strong digital and e-commerce foundation, complete with tools and platforms across the major retail tech acronyms, including PIM, DAM, CRM, and PCOS. Without content strategy, luxury brands suffer from many issues, including:

• Lack of centralised content operations: Brand content teams are often siloed with too many disparate tools and disconnected, undocumented processes and guidelines. This makes executing consistent yet attenuated cross-channel campaigns hard to plan, create, personalise, and measure.

• A reactive—even outdated—approach to content creation: Brands focus on immediate needs or short-term campaign tactics, instead of planning for volatility or original creative approaches.

• Failure to scale globally with nuance: A lack of true regionalisation and localisation content strategy leads to content that may resonate with an American luxury buyer may miss the mark in other markets.

• An underinvestment in data-driven storytelling: For all the attention brands give to data and analytics, many do not use consumer insights in a holistic, fully applied way to guide narrative design and content decision-making.

Why Luxury Content Strategy and Operations Matter in Uncertain Times

No brand needs blanket advice on strategy and staying ahead of trends in an uncertain global economy. Most brand strategists will tell you that what brands need is a core understanding of their own “why,” what the unique value add of their products are, who their target customers are, and how, where, when, and for what they shop. Yet, what brand strategy misses is the medium of exchange—the sharing of information and ideas—that inspires, informs, and drives customers to purchase. This is more than just marketing. It is the what, why, how, where, when, and why of content and how brands and their customers use and experience it.

Content comprises anywhere your target audiences encounter your brand messaging.

While getting content right is one among many factors that contribute to consumer purchase decisions, content is indelibly linked to brand storytelling for luxury brands and, in turn forms a key differentiating factor between luxury goods and services and other kinds of goods and services when it comes to customer value creation.

So what exactly can holistic content strategy and content operations do for luxury brands amid heighted geoeconomic uncertainty?

Here’s a handful of benefits:

1. Resilient Content Revenue Streams

With potential U.S. tariffs and shifting Chinese demand exacerbating economic volatility, content is how brands can build deeper relationships with consumers in existing markets while generating new ones.

• Localised narratives can help brands identify and engage with new audiences in regions underrepresented in their sales mix without concerns over brand dilution.

• Dynamic campaigns with the flexibility to scale or scale back with budget constraints can give brands flexibility during uncertain times. Basic processes like a documented creative brief intake form and workflow can help track new and ongoing projects.

2. Consumer-Centric Storytelling and Differentiation

For all the renewed attention on product-centric approaches to brand building and customer experience, luxury consumers are overwhelmed with content across channels as well as a multiplicity of ways to buy your products. To drive product discovery and purchase decisions, luxury brands need to guide consumers at every touchpoint of their shopping journey through appropriate and emotionally-engaging content.

• Micro-storytelling through targeted campaigns and localised brand moments can draw in consumers through your brand’s unique value proposition and products.

• Quality over quantity matters with luxury content to drive deeper engagement, product discovery, and brand loyalty, ideally in direct correlation with both customer retention and pricing strategies.

3. Operational Efficiency

Implementing a defined holistic content strategy astronomically reduces operational inefficiencies and internal spending by aligning marketing, branding, and creative teams under a single, integrated vision for brand content.

Where Brands Can Start with Luxury Content Strategy

Ultimately, luxury brands need content strategy now more than ever to hedge risks and differentiate themselves in an increasingly dispersed market environment. Yes, getting the product-pricing equation right matters to customer purchase decision-making. Yet, for high-net-worth and ultra-high-net-worth consumers, creating meaningful, truly elevated customer experiences through consistent, compelling, and channel-appropriate content and brand storytelling equally matters, particularly given the increasingly diffuse nature of most customer shopping journeys across touchpoints.

Some easy ways to start with holistic content strategy include:

1. Start with consumer and competitor research and targeting, using predictive modeling and consumer data to generate insights to allow your brand to anticipate market shifts and changing consumer content preferences and behaviours.

2. Focus on localisation and personalisation at scale, tailoring your content to align with cultural nuances of specific regions and locations.

3. Automate lower-level content functions like workflows and basic content production to integrate and streamline content operations across teams.

4. Create a holistic content strategy and operations model that meets your brand vision and consumer needs. This will help your brand create consistent and connected storytelling, diversified, dynamic content types, and integrated, effective content across and within channels.

Insights

• Fast fashion has increasingly adopted the narrative tools that once defined luxury, using storytelling, clear points of view, world-building, and immersive experiences to deepen engagement beyond product alone.

• At the same time, luxury brands are fragmenting their identity, adopting faster product cycles, performance-driven content, and DTC-style marketing, often at the expense of narrative coherence and long-term differentiation.

• In bringing in a designer like Galliano, Zara leans into this tension, embedding storytelling, point of view, and immersion into its business model by layering luxury’s narrative tools directly into its fast-fashion system.

John Galliano has always approached fashion as something closer to narrative than product. His work is purposefully cinematic and provocative, unfolding through character, mood, and atmosphere until the clothes feel inseparable from the world around them. This narrative instinct has defined his career across houses. This is evident in the theatrical romanticism of Givenchy and the era-defining spectacle of Christian Dior to the more recent, deliberately constructed worlds of Maison Margiela (see our analysis of his creation of a Victorian underworld for Margiela’s SS2024 Artisanal collection). Across each of these, the through-line has remained consistent: fashion as narrative system rather than product output.

At a moment when much of the luxury industry is defined by speed, repetition, and constant visibility, Galliano’s work has continued to insist on depth. It creates space for thought, interpretation, and meaning. It asks the audience to engage rather than simply consume. Even as the pace of fashion has accelerated around him, Galliano’s approach has remained anchored in authorship.

Zara’s decision to bring fashion’s most narrative designer into its ecosystem is best understood in the context of narrative strategy and creative authorship. For the brand, this move is deliberate and savvy, and reflects how it is positioning itself within the broader shifts happening in fashion.

Fast fashion has increasingly adopted the narrative tools that once defined luxury: storytelling, a clear point of view, world-building, and immersive experience. At the same time, luxury brands are fragmenting their own identity, adopting faster product cycles, performance-driven content, and DTC-style marketing, often at the expense of narrative coherence. The result is a fashion industry where content is constant, but narrative differentiation and coherence feel increasingly rare.

Zara makes no attempt to resolve this tension, and, in fact, leans into it. The brand unabashedly remains a fast-fashion business built on speed and accessibility, but it is now deliberately layering in the same narrative tools that once set luxury apart. Bringing in a designer like Galliano signals a shift toward storytelling, point of view, and immersion as part of how the business operates, not just how it presents itself.

This is what makes the Zara x Galliano move effective. Zara is working within its fast-fashion model while drawing directly from luxury’s narrative playbook at a moment when the industry is moving away from it. Rather than choosing between speed and meaning, it is combining both and showing how narrative can function within a high-volume system without losing clarity or control.

Narrative, the Galliano Way

As a designer, what distinguishes Galliano is not simply his aesthetic, but how he approaches fashion itself. He does not start with product and build outward. He builds a world and creates the clothes that exist inside it. Image, casting, music, set, and movement work together so that the collection reads as a complete narrative universe rather than a series of individual looks. The effect is immersive. You are not just seeing the clothes. You are experiencing the narrative fabric that gives them meaning.

Galliano is Galliano no matter where he works and has adapted his creative perspective to very different houses. At Christian Dior, he brought us highly theatrical runway shows that pushed fashion toward spectacle, with history, fantasy, and character shaping how each collection was understood. His tenure ended in 2011 after antisemitic remarks, a moment that remains part of his legacy and continues to shape how his work is received.

For better or worse, Galliano’s re-invention at Maison Margiela was a marvel, providing a platform into which he could play and sharpen his narrative world-building skills. At Margiela, his work slowed down and became more precise, with a stronger emphasis on atmosphere and construction, though the underlying approach did not change.

Galliano’s unmistakable narrative flair and his complicated legacy form part of what makes him such a polarizing figure in fashion. His work brings a clear point of view, and his presence carries a level of tension that cannot be separated from it.

For Zara, this is exactly why the collaboration works. The brand is focused on its bottom line to sell clothes and is not trying to explain or resolve the tension that Galliano brings, though it arguably leaves space for it. Bringing in a designer who builds meaning through context allows Zara to deepen its own narrative strategy and system without changing its business model, if you will. Instead of layering storytelling onto product, the brand can create an environment where product and narrative operate together.

As we have explored in an essay entitled “The Differentiation Economy”, this is where many luxury brands struggle to differentiate. Storytelling is often treated as a marketing layer, disconnected from commerce and customer experience, resulting in fragmented narratives across channels and a weakened brand identity. Zara takes a more restrained approach. It builds the context and lets meaning come through.

Narrative as System, Not Campaign

It is too early to assess how this collaboration will be expressed. What is already clear, however, is that Zara has built the kind of system that can support it.

This is most visible in its digital environment. The Zara app, in particular, functions less like a traditional e-commerce platform and more like a continuous experience. Editorial content, campaign imagery, and product are presented within the same flow. Navigation feels guided, intuitive, and visual rather than purely functional (a big improvement from its former approach that conflated navigation categories with taxonomy). In app, you move through collections, not just across product grids. The transition from inspiration to purchase is direct, but it does not feel abrupt.

Zara has been expanding this with more interactive formats. Its live shopping campaigns, including those featuring Kaia Gerber alongside Cindy Crawford, bring storytelling, personality, and product into a single in-app experience. Behind-the-scenes editorial, video content, and other interactive elements sit alongside product rather than pointing to it from elsewhere. The effect is cumulative. The user is not moving between content and commerce. They are experiencing both at once.

This matters because it changes how narrative operates. Zara builds story directly into the shopping experience, so content and commerce move together rather than separately. In luxury, those elements are often developed in parallel and do not fully connect, which can make the experience feel fragmented. Here, Zara’s advantage is structural, as it has built a system where narrative can scale.

Fast Fashion and Luxury Are Trading Playbooks

Another reason the Zara x Galliano collaboration is interesting is how it reflects where the industry is heading.

Fast fashion is no longer defined by speed alone. It is borrowing from luxury’s narrative playbook, using storytelling and point of view to hold attention in a saturated market. Luxury, on the other hand, is moving in the opposite direction. Growth pressures have pushed brands toward faster cycles, constant content, and performance-driven marketing, often at the expense of a coherent experience.

The result is a shift in corporate strategy. Fast fashion is building more depth, while luxury is increasing its output. The industry is starting to take on a “push me–pull you” shape, with fast fashion pulling toward narrative depth while luxury pushes toward speed and volume. The risk for luxury is not product quality, but brand differentiation and narrative clarity. The brand becomes harder to read as a single idea.

Zara sits directly within this shift. It is continuing to operate at scale, but is building more context around the product so story and shopping move together. The Galliano collaboration nicely fits into this approach, adding a stronger creative perspective to a system already designed to carry it. And the experience holds together even at scale.

What This Means in Practice

For decision-makers across fashion and luxury, the Zara x Galliano collaboration are offers some practical lessons in content and narrative strategy:

• Narrative needs to be built into the system, not added as a campaign layer

• Story and commerce need to operate together, not in parallel

• A clear point of view is now expected, not optional

• Experience matters as much as product in holding attention

• Speed alone is no longer enough to differentiate

A Slower Layer Within a Fast System

Ultimately, while content volume and supply chain demands remain an operational reality, the fashion industry needs to move more towards narrative coherence. Not slow fashion per se, but fashion that knows how to hold attention. Zara is not resolving the shift. It is showing how to operate within it with greater precision, control, and restraint.

Zara is not stepping outside the system. It is working within it by building more context around how the brand is experienced, using content and storytelling as tools to build and deepen experience, meet consumers where they are, and guide them throughout their shopping journey. Their model remains fast and accessible, but it is structured in a way that allows for depth and immediate engagement, rather than being solely product focused.

Bringing in Galliano fits well with this strategic narrative approach. His work has always centered on building worlds where fashion extends beyond the garment itself. Within Zara’s system, this way of working does not disrupt the model. On the contrary, it reinforces it, giving shape to a high-volume environment that might otherwise feel forgettable.

As fashion evolves, brands that can align story, experience, and commerce will be better positioned to hold attention over time. Zara offers a solid example of what that looks like in practice.

AI adoption is now being linked to job performance. Let that sink in.

Companies like Accenture, as reported recently in the Financial Times, are now judging employee performance by tool usage. At It’s A Working Title, we have clients in the same boat.

It’s a wild state of affairs and arguably shows the extent to which the hype is outpacing sense.

Yet, most enterprise organisations have content ecosystems that aren’t actually mature enough for the AI applications they’re trying to use, never mind their teams or customers.

Global businesses are at a pivotal moment in the technological arms race to modernise, transform, and grow. Many companies are charging ahead with increasingly powerful tools like AI without first evaluating whether their operational infrastructure, teams, tools, and content ecosystems are actually prepared to support them. Nowhere is this more visible than in content.

There is a persistent assumption that AI will sort out the mess and organise scattered assets, correct inconsistencies, enforce brand voice, and deliver personalisation at scale. But AI does not fix fragmentation. It reflects it. When the underlying content is unstructured, inconsistent, duplicative, or siloed across teams and platforms, AI simply accelerates those issues and makes them harder to manage.

The unfortunate paradox for most businesses is that while AI sophistication is rising, content maturity remains largely static. Most organisations still treat content as disposable marketing output rather than as a structured business asset that requires standards, governance, and ongoing maintenance. Content exists in disconnected systems (web, e-commerce, CRM, sales enablement, social, etc), each with its own workflow, taxonomy, and interpretation of the brand narrative. The result is predictable: inconsistency, duplication, and assets that are virtually impossible for machines to understand or use effectively.

AI requires the opposite environment. It depends on consistent narrative foundations, reusable content components, shared taxonomies, and a governed semantic layer that makes relationships between concepts explicit. Without this structure, AI cannot retrieve or generate reliably because it lacks the meaning architecture required to interpret information in context. Even the most powerful model cannot produce coherence from incoherence. That is why assessing content readiness is no longer optional; it is the prerequisite for any responsible AI implementation.

So, how do you assess an organisation’s readiness for AI?

In our latest white paper, Assessing Content Ecosystem Readiness for Artificial Intelligence, we have designed a 34-point, self-directed audit to help organisations understand exactly where they sit on that spectrum and what steps are required to evolve from AI-curious to truly AI-ready.

DOWNLOAD THE AI CONTENT READINESS AUDIT

Luxury excels at spectacle. From collaborations tied to the Winter Olympics in Milan to Louis Vuitton’s partnership with Formula 1, luxury brands are expanding into new categories, launching beach clubs and remote travel activations, jumping onto viral social trends, and investing in micro-culture and long-form content in an effort to drive engagement. Yet many of these initiatives fall short on the narrative substance and cross-channel consistency required for true brand differentiation and enduring brand meaning. As campaigns and activations multiply, the connective tissue that should unite them into a coherent whole becomes increasingly fragmented.

As our recent white paper, The Differentiation Economy: Why Narrative Systems Will Define Growth in the AI Era, explores, the problem with luxury content today is not a lack of storytelling or creative expression across visual merchandising, digital marketing, product design, or runway presentations. It is a palpable lack of narrative cohesion and differentiation across channels. Narrative cohesion is central to luxury brand storytelling, which attracts consumers and drives long-term value. Brands that offer good, cohesive stories win with consumers.

Strong storytelling on one platform—Instagram, TikTok, a fashion film, or a runway moment—often masks a deeper disconnect between brands and consumers. That disconnect typically reflects internal fragmentation within the brand’s own content ecosystem: siloed teams, separate creative budgets, minimal collaboration, competing priorities, and poorly documented rules for how content is developed and sustained over time. The result is not a lack of content, but a state of luxury content pandemonium.

This raises an important question: how can luxury storytelling feel so disconnected at a moment when brands are becoming media empires and their agency partners pioneers of transmedia marketing?

A surprisingly sharp answer comes from the 1961 film Lover Come Back, featuring Rock Hudson and Doris Day as creative leads at rival ad agencies. In the film, Hudson inadvertently launches a saturation marketing campaign for a product called “VIP”. The problem is that “VIP” doesn’t exist. Billboards, television spots, and print ads flood the market with generic but compelling messages (“Everything I have is because of VIP”) and the campaign goes the modern equivalent of viral. Only later does Hudson scramble to invent the product itself, which results a highly alcoholic chocolate candy that sends Madison Avenue into a frenzy.

The satire in Lover Come Back works because it exposes a truth that still holds today: distribution, amplification, and creative spectacle can temporarily mask the absence of substance. The problem is not that advertising is powerful; it is that advertising without an underlying narrative reality eventually collapses under its own weight. What looks like success is often just momentum without meaning.

Many luxury brands now find themselves in a similar position—producing high-impact, pseudo-narrative content that leans heavily on celebrities, influencers, and trends, but says little about a distinctive point of view. Like “VIP”, the spectacle often precedes the substance. The result is content that feels impressive in isolation yet forgettable in aggregate, trading short-term engagement for long-term brand building.

This dynamic helps explain why some brands are pulling ahead while others struggle. Why is Burberry—whose score on our IWT Content Effectiveness Index rose from a 5 in 2025 to a 7 in January 2026—regaining momentum with consumers, while a heritage house like Gucci, which scored a 3, continues to wrestle with resonance? As the case studies that follow illustrate, the difference is not creativity or investment, but the presence—or absence—of a coherent narrative system.

The brands that win with content over time are those that invest not only in brand strategy, but in narrative systems that enable teams to express a consistent, authentic, and culturally grounded worldview across channels. Crucially, these systems also create the operational clarity required to integrate technologies like AI and personalisation without amplifying fragmentation.

Burberry vs Gucci: Heritage, Value, and Narrative Cohesiveness

Lover Come Back offers a useful lens through which to analyse the current state of luxury content. At a time when brands are under pressure to operate like media companies operate across an expanding set of channels, platforms, and cultural moments, the challenge is no longer producing creative work, but ensuring that those moments accumulate into something coherent. Examining the content performance of Burberry and Gucci over the past two years make this contrast visible. Both brands deliver high-quality creative, yet only one has taken the time to re-organise its storytelling around a clear narrative axis, while the other continues to spin around and experiment in multiple directions without a unifying centre.

Burberry: Narrative Consistency Through “Burberry Forward” and Heritage-Rooted Storytelling

Over the past two years, Burberry has undergone a strategic recalibration that places narrative coherence at the centre of its content ecosystem. Under CEO Joshua Schulman’s “Burberry Forward” strategy, the brand has consciously shifted toward storytelling that connects heritage, recognisable British cultural touchpoints, and modern relevance.

Campaigns and Narrative Anchors

• “It’s Always Burberry Weather” series: An ongoing campaign that reframes classic British imagery through contemporary lenses, starring British models like Nora Attal and drawing on playful tropes from everyday British life.

• High Summer 2025 campaign: Evocative seasonal storytelling featuring Rosie Huntington Whiteley and Jack Draper that ties the brand’s maritime references and trench coat heritage to modern lifestyle narratives.

• Celebrity-led mini films: Actors such as Olivia Colman and music icons including Liam Gallagher have anchored digital and IRL+ activations that emphasise Cool Britannia with a cultural specificity rarely sustained across luxury campaigns.

• Music-inspired runway at London Fashion Week: Burberry’s Spring Summer 2026 show was explicitly tied to British music culture, from crochet and fringe detailing to a rock infused soundtrack, reinforcing a coherent aesthetic narrative across runway, editorial, and social channels.

Digital and IRL+ Integration

Rather than chasing every emerging trend, Burberry has anchored digital experimentation, from NFTs in Blankos Block Party to selective gaming activations, to its core narrative. Offline, flagship environments and window displays echo the same themes of Britishness (like the kitschy knight’s helmets that feel omnipresent in their social media), weather, and everyday luxury, rather than presenting disjointed episodic moments. The result is a disciplined ecosystem in which each touchpoint reinforces a shared worldview, marking a clear shift from the brand’s recent past.

Gucci: Abundant Creativity, Fragmented Narrative

Gucci’s investments in digital, experiential, and cultural activations are, in a word, but, from the outside, its brand ecosystem lacks a single, apparent narrative that connects one initiative to the next. For the most part, it feels like the brand is throwing creative paint at the wall to see what will stick, which is not a good way to position a brand, never mind build worlds.

Campaigns, Platforms, and Narrative Drift

• Demna’s debut campaign: The first major marketing rollout under creative director Demna Gvasalia leaned into archetypes and identity cues. However, many critics noted that its metaphorical framework felt disconnected from both Gucci’s heritage and its prior creative eras.

• Gucci library retail window installations: Recent flagship window displays built around a library motif were widely admired for their craft, symbolism, and visual restraint. The installations referenced knowledge, culture, and heritage in a way that felt thoughtful and elevated, yet they appeared largely as a standalone moment, with limited integration into Gucci’s broader campaign storytelling or digital narratives.

• Gucci Garden on Roblox and in the metaverse: One of the earliest and most extensive (and likely expensive) luxury metaverse activations, blending exploration with heritage inspired rooms, AR digital sneakers, and collectible elements.

• Web3 partnerships with SUPERPLASTIC: Fine art NFTs and character driven collaborations that expanded Gucci’s digital reach but sat wide of a core narrative centred on product or cultural positioning.

• Fashion screens and digital sneakers: Initiatives such as Gucci Virtual 25 and other digital fashion drops that operate in virtual worlds but often without clear linkage to the brand’s current storytelling pillars.

Fragmentation Across Channels

Suffice to say, Gucci’s content efforts across channels, from the runway to gaming and immersive, IRL+, social media campaigns, and beyond, largely stand on their own, rather than working together to reinforce a single, cohesive story.

This artistic decentralisation, if you will, while culturally rich and at times highly successful in driving engagement, results in a constellation of content moments that rarely coalesce into a deeply differentiated narrative identity. As a consequence, Gucci’s content ecosystem often feels like many icons and few stories. That reality is reflected in its lower placement on content effectiveness measures and, in many cases, slower resonance with broader luxury audiences.

Narrative Systems vs. Moments

The difference between Burberry and Gucci does not come down to money or creativity. Both are strong in these areas. The real difference is how their content is organised and sustained over time.

Burberry’s recent campaigns and activations feel coherent because they are grounded in a clear point of view and rolled out deliberately across channels. Each moment builds on the last; and the stories all feel like they’re coming from the same brand. Gucci’s content, by contrast, is often strong in an individual moment or on a specific touchpoint, like their library store windows, but on the whole it tends to move in several directions at once, without a single organising idea pulling everything together.

What Burberry is building looks less like a collection of campaigns and more like a connected system. It works in stores, online, on social, and in newer platforms because it is designed to do so. Meanwhile, Gucci is building moments, but without enough connective structure to turn them into a sustained narrative.

Why Narrative Systems Win

Burberry’s turnaround demonstrates how narrative alignment changes the behaviour of an entire content ecosystem, as the improvement in its IWT Content Effectiveness score over the past year reveals. When strategy and storytelling are structurally connected, campaigns, social activations, and IRL+ experiences work together and reinforce one another instead of competing for attention. As AI-driven distribution and personalisation accelerate, this dynamic will become increasingly important. Systems amplify intent. Fragmentation amplifies noise.

The implication for luxury is clear. Content should no longer be treated as a series of isolated moments or micro-cultural episodes, regardless of the spin or social media attention they receive. It should function as an interconnected ecosystem whose strength depends on coherence over time. As the example of the film Lover Come Back nicely showcased, creative momentum can be manufactured, but it cannot be sustained for the long term without underlying narrative reality. Narrative brand systems that are deliberately designed, documented, and operationalised are what allow meaning to travel, compound, and endure.

(Video credits: Burberry, “It’s Always Burberry Weather”; Gucci, “La Famiglia”)

This is the third annual luxury industry Year Ahead report produced by the research team at It’s A Working Title LLC. Like its two predecessors, this report aims to look around the corner at trends that we believe will impact the luxury industry over the next twelve months.

Yet, this is neither a trends report nor a linear outlook on the year ahead. Instead, this report examines the structural conditions shaping differentiation in the luxury industry and the systems that determine which brands are positioned to grow amid ongoing uncertainty. We start with establishing the methodological and philosophical foundation for this analysis. Our argument then unfolds through data, comparative performance, and observed patterns across brand content ecosystems.

Additionally, the Mary Shelley epigraph above is not accidental. Her warning about mechanistic imitation without understanding foreshadows a central risk we explore in this report: the application of powerful systems, particularly artificial intelligence, without the narrative, structural, and operational frameworks and strategy required to control their effects.

We have some pride in the way that our previous forecasts have worked out, but these reports principally have the function of setting a baseline for strategy and tactics (you have to start somewhere) and humility.

The one truly reliable forecast is that the future is hard to predict. The traditional line was that the farther your forecast extends out, the less accurate it becomes. That is intuitive. But, increasingly, the near-term is very tricky too. Despite the pitfalls, production of these types of look-ahead reports is at a historic high. But, the method of forecasting remains mostly the same. First, you consider a trend from the prior year or years. Second, you present a mostly linear extrapolation of that trend into the next year (Ŷₜ₊ = w₀‍Yₜ + w₁‍Yₜ₋₁ + w₂‍Yₜ₋₂ + …), probably giving greater weight to the more recent past (w₀‍ >w₁‍ >w₂‍ >…). This is a good, safe way of presenting forecasts, as everyone is familiar with the recent past, and since nobody is that great at predicting the future, it does not raise too many objections.

But, this model does not forecast well. Also, it is boring as the main conclusion is that, “next year will look like a very slightly different version of last year.” The model is highly biased due to its extreme simplicity, but it also suffers from high variance because any small change in the world not accounted for in the simple forecast model will lead to a reality that is radically different from the forecast. This type of approach gets linear trends sort of right but misses the turning points where new trends are developed.

And if the forecast is missing the new trends then you could say, “what’s the point of this exercise.” This is not a criticism per se of doing these types of looks round the corner just a reminder to be humble and, hence, tactically and strategically flexible.

So what does this report have to say about the near term that is slightly at odds with current trends, forecasts, and, frankly, the whole industry narrative? It is this: the vast majority of industry investments in AI for content, marketing, and communications in 2026 will be a complete waste of money. To nuance a bit, they will not deliver the intended ROI. Some “waste” of money is expected in any investment in new technologies and this is the normal churn of creative destruction. But, without a course correction in the way that AI is applied in luxury content, we argue it will be a waste for a long time and risks destabilising what luxury is supposed to be all about.

In our view, applying AI to luxury content without a systems content strategy is a potential extinction-level event for many brands.

In the sections that follow, we demonstrate how narrative coherence, operational content design, and strategic simplicity, rather than louder campaigns or faster production, have become the true drivers of differentiation, resilience, and commercial performance in luxury, and why unresolved “content hysteresis” represents one of the greatest structural risks facing brand ecosystems in 2026.

Industry Differentiation Will Continue in 2026

The luxury industry seems to have broken its losing streak in late 2025. After six consecutive quarters of negative sales growth, earnings data for the three months ending in September point to very slight positive growth. Depending on what organisations/brands you include in your sample, how you weight it, and what definition of ‘revenue’ you use, you can get estimates between 0.01 and 0.4 percent growth or so. This does not signal an abrupt regime shift, but it may give some hope as a signal of stabilisation after the longest industry recession since the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. Using our econometric model-based forecasts, we expect industry growth to remain relatively weak, by historical standards, though positive for 2026 and 2027.

Yet, while most of the narrative around luxury for the past couple of years has been about a slowdown, the real story has been one of historically high differentiation. Some segments of the industry (for instance, beauty and wellness, travel and hospitality, and some automobiles) have exhibited resilience, while large segments of the fashion, leather goods, and wine and spirits businesses have struggled. But even among those luxury segments in recession, there has been a historically high degree of differentiated performance between winners and losers.

In fact, there has never been a period in recent history when performance by luxury brands has been so heterogeneous. To get a sense of the heightened level of dispersion in performance, we created a violin plot below, which illustrates how luxury firms’ revenue growth was distributed across the industry from 2017 to the latest results in 2025. The vertical axis shows revenue growth as a percentage for the luxury firms in our sample, while the width of the “violin” indicates the number of firms with results at that level. Taller, stretched violins indicate that firms’ performances were more scattered, while shorter, wider ones suggest they were more similar. The violin for the last two quarters is the longest over this nine-year period, and its thinness indicates relatively low clustering of similar results.

In fact since the pandemic, the volatility of luxury revenue growth has risen dramatically. Some standard measures of statistical variance point to this trend. The standard deviation of revenues, which shows the absolute spread of results, jumped from about 8–10 percentage points before 2019 to regularly above 20 and even into the 40s in recent periods. The coefficient of variation, which measures volatility relative to average growth, has spiked erratically since COVID—rising from around 0.7–1.0 before 2019 to levels above 2.0 and even near 4.0 in some recent half-years—showing that even strong years came with unstable performance. Meanwhile, the interquartile range—the spread between the middle 50 percent of firms—has widened from roughly 5–7 percentage points in the late 2010s to more than 12–13 percentage points after 2020, signalling that dispersion is no longer confined to a few outliers but now affects the core of the industry.

Our forecast is that differentiation will remain pronounced for the next two years, though it will come off its historic highs. The below figure exhibits our violin plots for 2024 and H1 2025 with forecasts for the fourth quarter of 2025 and semiannual forecasts for 2026 and 2027. We expect the standard deviation to decline from 21.9 in full-year 2025 to 17.4 this year and 13.1 next year. The coefficient of variation will decline from 2.3 in 2025 to 1.2 in 2027 while the interquartile range should drop from 26.1 to 14.6 during the same period. So we should start to see more cross-industry convergence as the broader industry emerges from recession, as we have predicted. But differentiation will remain above historical norms. What drives this unique period of differentiated performance across the luxury business?

The State of Luxury Brand Content and Storytelling in 2025

Content-wise, 2025 was a year of luxury noise and experimentation. Many luxury brands jumped on the AI bandwagon for marketing and social media content to varying degrees of success. Leaning into the trends for long-form content and TV-like episodic mini-narratives resulted in a lot of brands debuting on platforms like Substack and trying out new video content types on Instagram and TikTok.

Like last year, our January 2026 It’s A Working Title Luxury Content Effectiveness Index (IWT CEI) points to a strong positive correlation between brand-level content quality and revenue growth. This is the second annual update to the index since publicly launching a portion of our quantitative content strategy and marketing diagnostics to the public in a January 2025 white paper. The public version of the broader diagnostics that we present to clients scores brand content quality excellence across three dimensions: (1) narrative marketing quality, (2) audience targeting/channel fit, and (3) content shoppability.

The chart highlights clear contrasts in brand performance: the brands that are the most rigorously consistent with content continue to outperform their competitors. Miu Miu remains the industry standout, combining one of the highest content excellence scores with revenue growth of about 41 percent, signalling strong alignment between digital strategy and commercial results. Hermes, Burberry, Ralph Lauren, and Coach also demonstrate both high index scores and solid positive growth, reinforcing their leadership positions.

At the end of the day, the luxury brands that topped our January 2026 IWT CEI did not shift their strategy as much in 2025 from 2024 as one might expect: The brands winning with content demonstrate a tight, differentiated narrative content strategy, show that they know their consumers inside and out, and execute on content in a way that identifiably reflects their core brand codes while being properly attenuated to the channel and cultural moment.

While this may sound hardly groundbreaking, consider: Hermès with its illustrations and playfulness; Miu Miu with its quirky yet feminine combo of short- and long-form storytelling; Burberry with its Brit-centric “Burberry Forward” strategy; Ralph Lauren with its deep Americana and, of course, the bear and his adventures; and Coach with its hyper-Gen-Z focus, Tabby bag, and endlessly creative IRL storytelling. In short, content consistency in 2025 for these CEI top performing brands came in the form of expected content formats, recognisable storytelling modes, and signature brand codes that showed up in every piece of content on every channel in creative but familiar ways.

Other interesting takeaways from 2026 IWT CEI top performers included a demonstrable seasonality to content platform functionality like Instagram shoppability: during major shopping moments, like the pre-holiday rush, luxury leans into more shoppable content, whereas immediately after big shopping moments, shoppability noticeably declines into a balance of creative, product, and celebrity-driven content. The extent to which luxury brands should pull from the DTC buy now-shop now playbook on channels like Instagram is up for debate and at best an individual brand choice. That said, brands have the power to curate how, when, and where consumers can engage in social shopping. But, judging from the sheer randomness of shoppability on many luxury brand social accounts, it is not clear that making a post shoppable is anything more than a random tactical decision rather than the result of planned strategic execution.

Indeed, middle and low performers on the IWT CEI this year showcased an almost overwhelming amount of content same-feelingness, inconsistency across platforms, lacklustre narrative, and copycat content marketing techniques, even among those that may seem more creative on the surface. And AI content experiments resulted in mixed reviews from consumers, even when overtly identified on the campaign level.

Mid-level performers–the likes of Zegna, Prada, Thom Browne, Jimmy Choo, LVMH Fashion & Leather, etc–are united by the presence of brand narrative but a lack of cohesion and actual differentiation in how these brand narratives get expressed through content on specific platforms. These brands, such as Zegna and Thom Browne, tend to excel at value-based or heritage storytelling on one channel, e.g. Instagram or the physical runway but struggle with the follow-through in other physical and digital contexts, which creates an inconsistent look and feel on the whole. This is particularly true for how these brands choose to show up in e-commerce, save for a handful of LVMH brands and Stone Island, which take a more distinctly narrative POV.

Low performers on this update of the IWT CEI, like Gucci and Versace, show a significant lack of consistency, a plethora of product and celebrity-driven campaigns with minimal or poorly-focused brand narrative, and content that is ill-targeted or overly generalised to specific channels and audiences.

On the whole, the January 2026 IWT CEI results make one point clear. Performance is no longer driven by platform tactics, creative novelty, or AI experimentation. It is driven by whether or not a brand operates from a coherent narrative system and a disciplined content architecture that governs how brand stories are designed, adapted, and executed across channels. The question for 2026 becomes not what new formats or technologies luxury should adopt, but whether brands are structurally prepared to build and sustain meaningful differentiation at scale.

The Differentiation Economy and the Future of Luxury Content in 2026

Online pundits keep observing that the luxury industry is in a crisis of its own making. Yet, as we have extensively written, the real story of luxury right now is one of differentiation: some brands continue to grow, while others are floundering. Luxury is not a monolith. It is a vast industry with highly idiosyncratic verticals that operate by their own rules, each serving distinct, though often overlapping audiences with unique needs, habits, and preferences. In a moment where many luxury fashion brands are struggling to distinguish themselves and attract the right shoppers under the weight of shifting post-pandemic consumer purchasing habits, other parts of the luxury industry, such as hospitality, which have more inherently service-focused, content-first business strategies, are reaping the benefits.

Does luxury need to be transformed? Perhaps yes, but it is already evolving as the business environment shifts and grows in real time. From now and into the future, the luxury brands that win with content will continue to win with consumers because we now live in a globally connected content-ocracy whether we like it or not. The key questions are no longer whether content matters, but how a brand stands out, what it stands for, and why it should last the test of time.

Content-wise, 2026 will be the year of simplicity and narrative streamlining. The brands winning with content will use AI more strategically and more quietly, largely behind the scenes in contexts with proven resonance for audiences. There is also a measurable seasonality to Instagram shoppability, and brands are increasingly able to flex a DTC mindset when it meaningfully serves campaign goals or long-term brand vision. There will be more play and less determinism in brand marketing content, less tactical copycatting of social trends, and more experimentation through the expression of brand codes in verisimilitudinous mini-narratives and episodic storytelling.

At the same time, brands are increasingly facing what we might call “content hysteresis”: the lingering effect of years of fragmented, campaign-led, trend-reactive content decisions that continue to shape brand perception, internal operations, and audience trust long after those tactics have stopped working. Just as in physical systems, hysteresis in content ecosystems means that change is not immediate, reversible, or frictionless. Brands cannot simply “decide” to be coherent, premium, or emotionally resonant; they must actively unwind the narrative debt embedded in their content architectures, workflows, and audience relationships. This makes consistency, simplicity, and structural coherence not only strategic virtues, but necessary corrective mechanisms.

Core brand strategy with streamlined, simple storytelling now matters more than ever, as strategists and brands alike need to stop treating luxury as a one-note category. Consistency has become the defining requirement for consumer-facing content, not because it is creatively limiting, but because system and structure allow brand storytelling to sing. Cutting through the noise of AI-generated content with something different but identifiably yours to say is critical to content in 2026 and beyond. When brands know how to package and distribute content correctly, their teams can spend more time on creative storytelling and less time worrying about where to cut a video for best effect or what a headline style should be.

So-called “boring” content types may ultimately be what lead brands to recognise the sheer power of holistic content strategy, particularly useful concepts such as structured, reusable content and repeatable templates. The brand differentiation and narrative consistency of top performers on the IWT CEI stems from brands creating and following a flexible, holistic content strategy backed by a defined narrative framework and organisationally appropriate operational infrastructure for content. This three-level approach makes brand content instantly recognisable, distinguishable from competitors, and easier for teams to create, publish, and scale, while also preparing content ecosystems for AI on both the front and back ends for content-specific use cases.

Building on our findings from the January 2026 IWT CEI, here are five predictions for luxury content in 2026:

1. Narrative coherence will become a measurable competitive advantage.

This year, brands with formal narrative frameworks will systematically outperform those without them across engagement, retention, and lifetime value metrics. In an AI-mediated content economy, coherence itself becomes an asset. Brands able to tell consistent stories across time, channels, and product lines will benefit from higher return on content investment, stronger recall, deeper emotional attachment, and more efficient reuse and scaling of content. Hospitality brands already operate this way, treating narrative continuity as infrastructure. Fashion and lifestyle brands that adopt similar narrative architectures will outperform those still operating in campaign silos.

2. Episodic storytelling will begin to replace campaign noise.

Luxury content will continue shifting away from loud, trend-chasing campaigns toward slow, episodic narrative ecosystems that function more like long-running brand series. In a global content ecosystem saturated with generative output, narrative consistency and world-building drive differentiation more than novelty. Brands will invest in creating serialised editorial universes, more holistic narrative experiences that more seamlessly connect IRL to digital, and evolving story worlds rather than one-off seasonal reinvention. Instead of endlessly rotating campaigns that are forgotten as quickly as they are posted, brands will start focusing on deeper, more aesthetic, and emotionally-driven storytelling to which consumers learn to recognise and return.

3. Content operations will more directly shape external brand perception.

How a brand runs content internally will increasingly determine how it is perceived externally. Operational incoherence produces narrative incoherence. Brands that invest in governance models, modular content systems, and repeatable narrative architectures will produce better, more distinctive storytelling. Brands without this level of operational infrastructure for content and content teams, platforms, and tools will continue to sound reactive, fragmented, and trend-dependent. Narrative distinction will be less a function of creative instinct and more the visible result of operational systemisation.

4. AI will become invisible infrastructure rather than a creative protagonist.

The luxury brands that begin to make headway with AI will use it quietly. AI will increasingly support modularisation, reuse, automation, formatting, distribution, and testing, while the storytelling layer will become slower, more protected. Structure will be more automated; but meaning will remain human. Brands that use AI as a creative driver will feel generic and disposable, while those that integrate AI into the backend of their content ecosystems will achieve consistency, scale, and cohesion without sacrificing narrative depth.

5. Narrative clarity and simplicity will become a signal of brand power.

As brand content demand and volume increases, content restraint will become even more of a core luxury signal. The most powerful brands in 2026 will communicate less but with greater narrative clarity, more emotional coherence. They will create less content with more connected narratives and fewer but more defined content types, while investing more deeply in consistent brand world building. In this context, simplicity will not mean minimalism or a lack of creative expressionism. Rather, it will signal a return to core brand codes and more differentiated brand identities.

In all, luxury does not need more content. It needs clearer stories, stronger systems, and more distinct brand worlds.

The brands that define luxury content in 2026 will not be the ones with the most viral posts or even the most technologically advanced. They will be the most consistent, the most narratively and emotionally legible, and the most structurally prepared. These brands will feel different because they are different, not necessarily in what they say, but in what they don’t and in how their entire content ecosystem is designed to make it impossible to forget who they are.

Luxury content has never been louder. Content calendars are full; campaigns are nonstop; and new formats and trends arrive faster than most brands can absorb them.

Yet, beneath this superficial abundance, full of splashy runway shows, celebrity campaigns, and expensive creative ads, something more troubling is happening.

In our January 2026 It’s A Working Title (IWT) Content Effectiveness Index (CEI), which assessed 24 global luxury brands, we found that as content output continues to rise, narrative coherence quietly deteriorates. Similarly, in our cross-sectoral quantification of content quality across 13 different industries released last week, we found that luxury ranked near the bottom. Luxury brands are producing more content, but meaning is fragmenting, if you will. Content—and, in turn, brand identity—feels like a sea of sameness and is fragmenting. And that fragmentation carries real commercial risk.

Louis Vuitton’s latest results make that risk visible.

Long regarded as the bellwether of global luxury, Louis Vuitton now offers a clear entry point into a broader comparative analysis of how narrative systems perform at scale. The brand’s recent performance does not simply reflect cyclical market pressures or shifting consumer sentiment. It exposes what happens when creative ambition expands faster than the narrative structures designed to support it. In this sense, Louis Vuitton functions less as an outlier than as a diagnostic case, making visible vulnerabilities that exist, to varying degrees, across the luxury sector as a whole.

Considered alongside the performance of brands such as Hermès and Miu Miu, both of which demonstrate strong narrative coherence in spite of very different creative expressions, Louis Vuitton’s results offer a useful frame for the commercial stakes of narrative design. Where narrative systems are clear, disciplined, and operationalised, brands retain meaning as they scale. Where they are diffuse or implicit, value begins to leak.

The LVMH full-year results provide the financial context for this comparison.

LVMH Full-Year 2025 Revenues

Based on the 2025 LVMH annual report, Louis Vuitton reported a 13% fall in net profit to €10.9 billion and a 5% decline in total sales to €80.8 billion. The most significant contractions in sales occurred in its Fashion & Leather Goods (-8%) and Wines & Spirits (-9%) divisions, categories integral to its market identity. These numbers reflect more than temporary macroeconomic headwinds; they are the result of persistent structural deficiencies in content and narrative systems, as formalised in their CEI brand score of 5. As we discuss below, brands with strong narrative systems reported positive and, in some cases, very strong sales growth last year.

The Latest IWT Content Effectiveness Index Results

Content coherence, as measured by the CEI, is not determined by production scale or creative novelty but rather by a brand’s capacity to maintain stable, recognisable, and unique narratives across all consumer touchpoints. Our latest IWT CEI white paper identifies three principal dimensions, which result in a total index score ranging from 3 to 9.

• Shoppability: The directness with which content translates brand aspiration into consumer action.

• Narrative Consistency: The discipline with which brand codes and storylines are maintained across platforms, channels, and campaigns.

• Targeting Precision: The rigour with which content addresses and aligns with defined audience strategies.

The most recent CEI results, presented in the scatterplot below, reinforce the trend towards pronounced differentiation between brands, rather than industry-wide progress. Only five brands achieved scores above 7: Miu Miu (8), Hermès (7), Coach (7), Burberry (7), and Ralph Lauren (7). These leaders operate from advanced, systematised narrative frameworks, not only excelling creatively but embedding coherence operationally at scale. As the positive correlation between our index and sales growth implies, consumers have rewarded these brands.

The middle tier—the likes of Brunello Cucinelli (6), Prada (5), and Zegna (5)—shares heritage strength but faces systemic problems. For these brands, while campaign assets remain compelling for the most part and some of them demonstrate active investment in innovation, improved digital CX, and better storytelling on the surface, e-commerce, retail store environments, and clienteling tools tell a different story, frequently conveying inconsistent or diluted brand narratives. The consequence is clear: an absence of strategic integration erodes content shoppability and audience clarity.

Louis Vuitton’s placement at the lower end, with a CEI score of 5, underscores the luxury sector’s core vulnerability. The brand’s substantial investment in creative assets across a myriad of channels—e-commerce, mobile, social, gaming, IRL, immersive, etc—is undermined by the lack of a unifying, modular narrative architecture. In short, they are telling a lot of stories but lack the narrative definition, consistency, and audience attenuation of their competitor brands. In this way, the recent financial decline of Louis Vuitton is not a cyclical anomaly; but rather it is an indicator of operational and narrative structural misalignment with commercial consequences.

Case Study: The Hermès Storytelling Model

Among luxury leaders, Hermès shows that narrative coherence, rather than campaign velocity, content volume, or channel diversity, is what sustains both brand equity and commercial resilience. Its work with emerging animators is a perfect example. Their Instagram is full of playful, visually inventive films that feel light and contemporary, yet always identifiably expressive of core Hermès brand codes. The aesthetic is fun without being noisy, expressive without spectacle. Here, animation, as a form of dynamic content, is being used as an expressive art form rather than just a trend vehicle.

Across touchpoints, from social shorts and product storytelling to flagship retail and experiential moments, Hermès quietly reasserts the same principles with rigor and discipline: the horse as a playful symbol of movement and history, leather as a living artefact of brand heritage, the artisan as craftsman and creative visionary, time measured in generations rather than seasons, and design that evolves through refinement, not disruption.

This narrative consistency is far from not accidental. Hermès’ content strategy is a perfect case study of brand strategy in action: clear narrative principles are reinforced by operational guardrails designed for scale. As the brand expands into new categories or markets, its narrative core stays fully intact and instantly recognisable, allowing experimentation at the surface while preventing dilution.

Structural Causes of Narrative Inconsistency

Our recent white paper identified three common characteristics or traits among lower-performing brands:

1. Operational Silos: Teams responsible for digital, retail, clienteling, and campaign assets produce work in functional isolation, in the absence of a unified, systematised narrative template. The result is channel-specific performance without overarching brand meaning.

2. Tactical Reactivity: Brands adapt too quickly to short-lived cultural moments and algorithmic shifts, which undermines narrative discipline and strategic longevity. Content is effective in the short term but destructive to long-term brand equity.

3. AI-Led Proliferation Without Systems: Rapid content scaling through AI tools, in the absence of robust narrative architecture, compounds inconsistency and deepens structural deficiencies. It also weakens brand positioning when AI outputs feel inconsistent or incongruous with brand codes, such as the recent negative reaction to Valentino’s rampant use of AI for its DeVain Digital Creative Project.

The Miu Miu Distinction: Coherence and Cultural Agility

For the luxury industry as a whole, Miu Miu’s sector-leading CEI score of 8 is instructive. The brand consistently demonstrates narrative discipline, cultural responsiveness, and deep audience awareness and shifts appropriately with the season and cultural moment. Miu Miu’s approach is not to impose rigid aesthetic codes, but rather to use an adaptive narrative framework—or the proxy of one through highly controlled brand strategy and content marketing—that maintains relevance across channels while staying true to its core brand identity.

Strategic Takeaways for Luxury Chief Marketing Officers

A CEI score at or below 5 does not point to a content problem in isolation. It signals that a brand’s narrative is fragmenting as it scales, and, in turn, that content investment may be starting to dilute, rather than compound, value.

For brands, the solution is not more content, faster output, or bigger budgets. It is the intentional design of narrative systems: shared principles, structures, and decision frameworks that allow creativity to scale without sacrificing meaning, consistency, or emotional clarity. When brand storytelling is designed rather than improvised, it functions as corporate strategy and risk management, protecting brand equity while enabling sustainable growth.

For global luxury brands operating at scale, narrative design is no longer a “soft” discipline. It is foundational infrastructure: the mechanism that ensures what a brand stands for remains legible, differentiated, and durable as markets, platforms, audiences, and expectations continue to evolve and shift over time.

Insights

• Differentiation is now structural, not creative. Performance gaps are widening across industries because some organisations operate with coherent content systems while others do not. Creative output and AI adoption alone no longer explain growth or stagnation.

• Content architecture has become a growth variable. Organisations with defined narrative systems, clear audience logic, and operationalised content governance consistently outperform peers across revenue growth, trust, and strategic agility.

• AI amplifies existing content maturity. AI rewards coherence and penalises fragmentation. Where content systems are strong, AI quietly increases scale and efficiency. Where systems are weak, AI increases noise, risk, and sameness.

• “Content hysteresis” is suppressing performance. Years of campaign-led and trend-reactive content decisions have embedded narrative debt into many organisations. This debt slows differentiation and makes strategic change difficult even when leadership and strategy evolve.

• Fewer, clearer stories now outperform volume. In an information-saturated media landscape, clarity, consistency, and narrative restraint have become signals of institutional strength. The most effective organisations communicate less, but with greater coherence and durability.

Introduction: Differentiation in the Age of AI

This is the first cross-sectoral content strategy and competitiveness report produced by the research team at It’s A Working Title LLC (IWT). Prior reports have drilled deeply into sector-specific content assessments and ranked individual firms, and even brands, to understand the drivers of competitive differentiation and growth. In this study, we examine content quality and the factors that drive it across 13 sectoral verticals.

Across industries, organisations are investing heavily in AI to transform how they communicate, market, scale, and do business. Yet, in spite of near-universal access to the same tools, performance outcomes are diverging rather than converging. Some organisations are pulling away from peers operating under identical economic and technological conditions. Others are producing more content than ever with diminishing returns.

With lessons learned from our work on systems content strategy and AI with a range of clients, this report finds that cross-firm distinctions in content effectiveness are not organisational or creative capability, platform strategy, or even AI sophistication. They are the result of investment in content strategy systems.

In this report, we argue that we are entering a differentiation economy in which growth accrues to organisations with coherent content systems and defined narrative architectures. In this environment, content is no longer a downstream expression or result of strategy. Content is, in fact, a governing system that shapes how strategy is understood, trusted, interpreted, and sustained over time.

Our cross-sectoral analysis shows a clear relationship between content effectiveness and performance. Organisations that treat content as an extension of corporate strategy and as essential operational infrastructure rather than marketing output are better positioned to:

• Communicate consistently across moments of change

• Build trust with increasingly fragmented audiences

• Flex with new technologies without destabilising their brand

• Scale meaning without increasing noise

By contrast, organisations operating with fragmented, campaign-led content ecosystems are experiencing what we describe as content hysteresis. Past content decisions continue to shape perception, workflows, and audience trust long after those tactics have stopped working. Narrative debt accumulates quietly, limiting differentiation and slowing strategic repositioning.

Unfortunately, in these circumstances, using AI does not resolve these internal organisational tensions. It exposes it.

Where content systems are coherent, AI functions as quiet infrastructure. It improves consistency, streamlines processes, accelerates reuse, and reduces operational friction. Where content systems are fragmented, AI increases volume without clarity and amplifies sameness. The technology itself is not the differentiator. The system into which it enters is.

This inaugural cross-sectoral IWT Content Effectiveness Index examines why some sectors have structurally outperformed others in the AI era. The patterns identified here now apply across enterprise technology, financial services, infrastructure, consumer sectors, healthcare, and media, among other sectors.

The central question is no longer whether organisations should adopt AI for content. The question is whether their content ecosystems are structurally ready or capable of supporting differentiation at scale.

The sections that follow examine how content systems, narrative coherence, and the right operational infrastructure for content determine which organisations grow, which stagnate, and which struggle to be understood at all.

AI does not create differentiation.

It reveals which organisations have structured, intentional content systems and which do not.

The Content Effectiveness Gap Across Industries

Before looking at sector-level performance, it is worth clarifying what sets apart high-performing organisations from the rest in the current environment. The differences are not a matter of creativity, channel mix, technology adoption, or even content quality. They are the result of structural investment in content strategy systems: the narrative frameworks, governance models, operating processes, and decision rules that determine what content is created, how it is expressed, and how it scales over time.

Across industries in our client work, we see the same pattern over and over again. Organisations that operate with coherent narrative systems and defined content operations are able to communicate consistently, scale meaningfully, and absorb new tools without destabilising their identity. Those that do not struggle to convert activity into advantage, even as investment increases, producing content is tactical rather than strategic, optimized for short-term impact but poorly aligned with corporate objectives or the changing needs, contexts, and expectations of target audiences.

The analysis that follows examines how these organisational differences in content effectiveness show up at the sector level. Rather than focusing on individual brands or platforms, we examine how entire industries tend to organise, think about, and create content, and why those choices are increasingly predictive of performance in the AI era.

At a high level, sectors cluster into three broad groups. While individual organisations can and do outperform their peers, these clusters reflect common structural tendencies rather than isolated success or failure.

Sectors at the top of the IWT Content Effectiveness Index include: enterprise and B2B software, infrastructure and semiconductors, energy and industrial systems, and asset and wealth management. These industries operate in complex, high-stakes environments where clarity, consistency, and trust are non-negotiable. As a result, content is often treated as a core strategic asset rather than a marketing output.

In these top-performing sectors, content systems are frequently characterised by:

• Clear narrative hierarchies that connect strategy to execution

• Defined audience segmentation across customers, partners, regulators, and investors

• Defined content governance around language, policies, and tone

• Content designed for reuse, longevity, and consistency across channels

These structural choices make it easier for organisations to scale communication without losing meaning. They also create conditions into which AI can be introduced as infrastructure, supporting modularisation, formatting, and distribution without destabilising narrative coherence.

By contrast, mid-performing sectors display partial or incomplete content maturity. They may have well-articulated brand narratives but struggle to express them consistently across touchpoints. Content may be strong in flagship moments or channels, but weaker elsewhere. Operational inconsistency, rather than a lack of vision, is often the limiting factor.

Common characteristics of this mid-performing group include:

• Strong top-line storytelling but uneven execution

• Inconsistent audience logic across channels

• Campaign-led planning that impedes narrative continuity

• Limited content reuse across formats and markets

At the lower end of the index sit sectors such as media and entertainment, platform-driven consumer technology, and parts of consumer lifestyle and luxury. In spite of being highly creative and content-intensive, these industries tend to suffer from fragmentation and information dilution. Content production is often driven by platform incentives, trend cycles, and short-term performance metrics rather than long-term narrative coherence.

In these environments, organisations in the lower-performing group often face:

• High content volume with low narrative memory

• Frequent shifts in tone, message, and positioning

• Overreliance on novelty, virality, and reactive formats

• Limited structural distinction between competitors

Over time, these patterns produce what appears to be differentiation on the surface but, in fact, is sameness in practice. As content accelerates, meaning erodes and brand identity for these organisations can become less potent and distinct.

What this cross-sectoral IWT Content Effectiveness Index ultimately shows is not a hierarchy of creativity or innovation. But rather, it reveals a hierarchy of content discipline. Some sectors have been forced by regulation, complexity, or risk to build content systems that prioritise clarity and coherence. Others, despite greater creative freedom, have allowed fragmentation to accumulate unchecked.

As the next section explores, these differences become far more consequential in an AI-mediated environment. AI does not smooth over structural weaknesses. It amplifies them. The sectors that have invested in content discipline are positioned to benefit quietly and compounding. Those that have not are likely to find that increased speed and volume only deepen existing challenges.

Content Hysteresis and the AI Amplification Effect

The performance gaps described in the previous section are not solely the result of present-day organisational choices. They are the cumulative outcome of how organisations have structured, governed, and resourced content over time. As AI adoption accelerates, these long-standing decisions are no longer latent. They are being surfaced, stressed, and, in many cases, exposed. This section examines the concept of content hysteresis to explain why some organisations adapt smoothly to change while others struggle and how AI acts as an amplifier of these underlying structural conditions.

As organisations accelerate AI adoption, many are discovering that transformation is not frictionless. This is due to content hysteresis: the lingering impact of “narrative debt” or past organisational approaches to content creation, management, and governance—both internally across teams and workflows and externally across channels, touchpoints, and audiences—on present and future performance.

Content hysteresis occurs when fragmented narratives, inconsistent messaging, and siloed workflows continue to shape perception and operations long after the tactics that produced them have stopped working. These patterns persist across internal processes and external communications alike. Change is not immediate or reversible. Organisations cannot simply decide to become coherent or differentiated. Narrative debt must be actively unwound. AI intensifies this dynamic by accelerating the reproduction of existing structures, whether sound or flawed.

Where content systems are coherent, AI functions as a stabiliser. It supports consistency, accelerates reuse, and reduces operational friction.

Where content systems are fragmented, AI accelerates failure. It increases volume without clarity, accelerates inconsistency, and amplifies sameness.

This explains why AI investment outcomes vary so widely across sectors. The technology itself is not the differentiator. The system to which it is applied is.

In our work, we consistently observe the following patterns:

• Organisations using AI primarily to generate content struggle with trust and differentiation

• Organisations using AI to govern, structure, and adapt content gain scale without dilution

• Higher visibility of AI correlates with weaker narrative outcomes

• Structural coherence is the primary determinant of return on AI investment

AI does not fix an organisation’s content problems. It makes them impossible to ignore.

The Differentiation Economy: Why Fewer, Cleaner Stories Win

The patterns outlined in this report point to a fundamental shift in how advantage is created and sustained. As AI accelerates production, distribution, and optimisation, differentiation is no longer determined by who can say the most, the fastest, or with the greatest technological sophistication. It is determined by whether an organisation has built the structural conditions required for its story to remain intelligible, credible, and coherent as it scales.

We are now operating in a differentiation economy. Growth no longer accrues evenly across categories. It accrues to organisations with structural narrative advantage: those that have invested in content systems capable of carrying meaning consistently across teams, channels, and time.

In this environment, many long-held assumptions about content and communication no longer hold:

• Volume is not relevance

• Speed is not intelligence

• Technology is not trust

What matters instead is whether an organisation can be consistently understood by customers, partners, employees, and markets across moments of growth, pressure, and change. Narrative legibility and distinction, if you will, have become a competitive asset.

High-performing organisations communicate less, but with greater clarity. They produce fewer content types with stronger connective tissue.

High-performing organisations communicate less, but with greater clarity. They produce fewer content types with stronger connective tissue between strategy, execution, and experience. Rather than constantly reinventing themselves through campaigns, they invest in recognisable narrative worlds that audiences learn to understand, trust, believe in, and return to. Simplicity becomes a signal of confidence, not constraint.

This shift does not diminish creativity. It protects it. Structure and systemisation allow creativity to compound. When teams are no longer renegotiating tone, message, or format with every content initiative, they can focus on deeper storytelling, richer experiences, and more meaningful innovation. Coherence reduces friction; and reduced friction creates space for better work.

The organisations that define the next phase of growth in an AI-mediated economy will not be the loudest or the most technologically visible. They will be the ones with clear boundaries, consistent narratives, and content systems strong enough to hold meaning as they scale. They will feel different because their choices are deliberate—and because those choices endure.

AI has not changed what actually creates differentiation. It has removed the ability to hide. Organisations can no longer rely on novelty, volume, or tools to substitute for clarity. Meaning must be designed, governed, and maintained, or it will disappear under scale.

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Our Fashion Strategy Weekly (FSW) team is taking a deliberately slow, focused start to 2026. Given the uncertainty of the global economy and the current state of luxury, this felt like the right approach. Also, our team is in a period of important transition. As our longtime readers may recall, we are undergoing a quiet transformation and rebrand into something new, which we are calling Untitled—a project about which we will be releasing more details in the coming weeks.

In the interim, we are pleased to share with you some of the latest work from It’s A Working Title (IWT), the agency behind FSW. The IWT team is made up of content strategists, economists, and narrative architects, among other experts. Over the past six months, we’ve spent a lot of time helping brands cut through the growing AI and tech noise by building content strategy systems, rooted in narrative design and content operations, that actually prepare teams and content ecosystems for meaningful AI use.

To say that this is a tall order would be an understatement, given all the noise surrounding AI, brands, and content. For this reason and a host of others, we’ve adopted a slightly out-of-the-box approach to our third annual IWT Year Ahead, one that is purposefully reflective but also non-linear and prospective without being overly prescriptive.

Our IWT Year Ahead 2026, The Differentiation Economy: Why Narrative Systems Will Define Growth in the AI Era, is neither a trend report nor is it another speculative take on what AI might do to brands. Not that we scoff at trend reports; we just find them increasingly deterministic in what is an undeniably volatile economy. Instead, we offer a structural analysis of why brand performance gaps are widening, why some companies are pulling away while others, operating under the same macroeconomic and technological conditions, are stuck or fragmenting.

In this report, we use luxury as the case study because its contradictions are more visible: excess content, diluted storytelling, and growing distance between brand myth, operational reality, and consumer expectations. Yet, the underlying dynamics explored here—narrative incoherence, content overload, and the misalignment between strategy, systems, and storytelling—are hardly unique to luxury. They are increasingly endemic across industries.

At its core, we argue that differentiation is no longer primarily a function of brand or marketing creativity, channel presence, or technological adoption. Rather, it is a function of narrative systems: how meaning is structured, governed, and sustained across time, platforms, and teams. AI does not resolve these tensions. It amplifies them.

We think that this report is a critical read for leaders, strategists, decision-makers, and marketers who sense that “more content,” “better tools,” and “faster execution” are no longer sufficient, and who are looking for a clearer explanation of what actually drives durable advantage in an AI-accelerated economy.

Unfortunately, we offer no silver bullets in this free thought piece. What we offer instead is a framework for thinking more precisely about why differentiation persists, why it fails, and what it takes to rebuild it before technology makes those gaps irreversible.

DOWNLOAD "THE DIFFERENTIATION ECONOMY"

The research team at It’s A Working Title LLC released its latest white paper Has the Luxury Recession Bottomed Out? The paper reviews the latest luxury industry results and presents econometric model-based forecasts for what to expect in 2026 and 2027.

Some key takeways include:

• The luxury industry appears to be emerging from its deepest downturn since the 2008 financial crisis. After six consecutive quarters of contraction, Q3 2025 delivered the first signs of stabilisation, with marginal but positive revenue growth across the sector. While this shift does not yet signal a robust recovery, it suggests the market may have finally reached its bottom.

• Beneath this aggregate improvement, however, the competitive landscape remains sharply fragmented. As the report shows, the spread between top and bottom performers remains at historic highs, with brands like Miu Miu, Coach, and Hermès sustaining strong momentum. In contrast, Gucci, Versace, and Thom Browne remain in negative territory. Even with some compression in Q3, the industry still reflects a level of performance divergence without precedent in the pre-pandemic era.

• Regionally, the dynamics are equally uneven. Asia’s return to slight positive growth marks one of the quarter’s most notable shifts, given its role as the primary drag on global luxury demand over the past several years. The United States continues to provide a stable anchor, delivering comparatively strong growth, while Europe remains flat, offering little directional pull for the sector overall.

• Across all these patterns, one theme consistently emerges: content strategy has become a structural determinant of performance. The pandemic accelerated the industry’s long-delayed digital transformation, placing new weight on a brand’s ability to create compelling, scalable, cross-channel narratives. Brands that invested early in digital storytelling, e-commerce, and content-led marketing architectures are now benefiting from strengthened consumer loyalty and sustained revenue resilience. Those that delayed these investments are struggling to differentiate themselves in an increasingly digital luxury landscape.

• The IWT Content Strategy Excellence Index makes this relationship visible. It highlights a strong correlation between content quality—defined by narrative design, channel fit, and shoppability—and commercial outcomes. Leaders such as Miu Miu, Hermès, and Coach combine high index scores with strong revenue performance, while laggards cluster at the low end of both measures. The widening gap between these groups underscores that content is no longer an accessory to luxury strategy; it is a primary driver of brand and business performance.

Curious how content strategy and narrative architecture can drive luxury industry growth and minimise operational complexity and cost? Explore our work at It’s A Working Title LLC to learn about our content strategy, content operations, and behavioural economics-informed approaches to brand storytelling.

In our previous article, we explored how luxury storytelling collapsed into content. This article is the first in a series of deeper case studies that turn the lens from why storytelling systems matter to what happens next. This article explores how the world’s most enduring brands, from Rolls-Royce to Apple, are cutting through the content chaos and are rebuilding meaning through narrative infrastructure.

Traditionally, content has been treated as a tactical operating expenditure (Opex). But, in the digital economy, content behaves much more like a long-term productive asset than a transient expense and is more akin to strategic capital expenditure (Capex). Content is how brands make meaning, shape culture, and scale identity across both digital and in-person customer, supplier, and employee relations.

Global brands are under pressure to produce more content than ever before, yet audiences are overwhelmed with a sea of content and are more fragmented and distracted than ever before. From fashion to finance, the race for visibility and attention has created an unprecedented flood of content across channels. For brands, the true cost of visibility is coherence and a lack of market differentiation.

Looking at the example of the luxury industry, once the gold standard of storytelling, illustrates this shift in the world of content. Global maisons were once the stuff of myth, focused on elevated, restrained storytelling through craftsmanship, symbolism, and limited marketing. With the global pandemic, the rush into digital and e-commerce transformed luxury content overnight. Today, even the most iconic luxury houses have adopted reactive tactics and try to function like media companies, trying to outcompete each other with creative campaigns, influencer content, and collaborations across markets and channels. The result of this has been content chaos and narrative fragmentation: too many stories told too quickly with no shared thread.

Content chaos is not limited to luxury. Any global company with a remit to communicate across markets and platforms now faces the same challenge: how to stay consistent, emotionally resonant, and adaptable in an age that rewards quantity and instant gratification over clarity and meaning.

Even outside fashion, the brands that are thriving understand that storytelling must be closely connected to corporate operations, not an afterthought. For example, Rolls-Royce treats narrative as an intrinsic part of product design and customer experience. Every bespoke automotive commission follows a shared creative grammar that connects engineering precision to emotional symbolism, from color stories inspired by couture fabrics to handcrafted interiors that echo British heritage. This level of narrative cohesion is what allows Rolls-Royce to scale personalization without diluting its brand myth.

Similarly, Apple’s product and marketing ecosystem, for all its recent product follies, nevertheless showcases narrative infrastructure at work: a closed-loop of hardware, design, and language so consistent that new launches feel inevitable, not invented (even if their innovation quotient is increasingly questionable). Both brands prove that meaning becomes measurable when storytelling is built into the system itself.

A New Way Forward for Brand Storytelling

There is a quiet shift underway. Many brands now are beginning to treat storytelling not as a one-off campaign or a creative exercise but as a system unto itself. The idea is simple: connect creative and operational processes for content so stories no longer just inspire but they also align, scale, and adapt.

Recent research from our IWT Markets team shows that brands that apply structured storytelling systems to their content ecosystem can streamline redundant content production by up to 25 percent while improving narrative coherence across markets. When storytelling becomes part of the corporate operational framework, creativity and efficiency can finally coexist.

Instead of rebuilding every campaign from scratch, brands can use shared frameworks and reusable content models to guide storytelling across teams, channels, and markets. It also does so in a structured way that makes their external content more scannable and promotable by AI search engines; but it also readies internal content ecosystems and teams for appropriate, targeted AI use cases. The goal with all of this is not to automate creativity or to remove humans from the equation by any means, but rather to make it more coherent, ensuring that meaning survives the pace of modern marketing and communications.

Why Content Strategy is Future Strategy

Brands that invest in content strategy and narrative design find content investments more sustainable and economical. Connecting storytelling to structure allows brands to reduce redundancy, speed up localization, and make personalization more efficient, saving both time and resources.

With global growth slowing and consumer trust harder to earn, investing in content strategy has become a strategic necessity. People want stories that feel authentic, consistent, personalized, and rooted in something larger than a marketing moment.

The future of brand storytelling will belong to those who learn to create less but mean more.

Read the full white paper, "Why Luxury Storytelling Collapsed into Content and How to Bring It Back.”

Luxury is at a narrative crossroads. When it comes to commerce, consumers, and content, brands are so focused on visibility and “engagement” that they have lost the plot on what really matters: telling authentic narratives so compelling that consumers choose the brand, not the algorithm.

Our latest white paper, “Why Luxury Storytelling Collapsed into Content and How to Bring It Back,” is a luxury insider’s guide on how to build storytelling systems that create cultural gravity, design for intelligence, and transform content into a true strategic asset.

Developed by It’s A Working Title and powered by the thinking behind our FlexNarra flexible narrative design system, this paper reveals why luxury brand content is becoming a sea of sameness and what leaders can do to reverse the collapse. Luxury’s true advantage comes from shaping culture, not chasing it.

Some quick insights:

• Luxury storytelling has fragmented due to the rise of e-commerce, social media, and short-term marketing tactics that prioritize visibility over value. This shift has led to disconnected brand narratives, diluted meaning, inflated tech stack spending, and declining consumer engagement, with Gen Z particularly sensitive to incoherent brand experiences.

• Effective luxury storytelling requires a systematic approach through narrative architecture to connect all brand touchpoints into a cohesive ecosystem. This involves integrating creative storytelling with operational infrastructure to ensure continuity, flexibility, and emotional resonance across digital and IRL channels and markets.

• Brands that win with quality content win with consumers. For brands to differentiate themselves and remain competitive, luxury storytelling should prioritize quality over quantity, focusing on building scalable, interconnected narrative systems. Brands like Miu Miu exemplify this approach by creating unified, culturally resonant stories, while others, like Louis Vuitton, risk losing coherence through excessive, unstructured content initiatives.

• This paper examines the current landscape of luxury brand storytelling, tracing its evolution and fragmentation in response to the rapid shift to e-commerce during the pandemic and the growth of social media. It will explore why adopting a more systematic, structured approach to storytelling could offer a deeper, more authentic experience for both luxury brands and their customers.

The future of luxury storytelling demands both creative imagination and infrastructure. This is where the luxury narrative blueprint begins.

A smarter luxury storytelling system starts here. Define your narrative advantage.

Download the white paper

Curious how content strategy and narrative architecture becomes practice? Explore our work at It’s A Working Title LLC.

• The luxury sector has logged six consecutive quarters of negative revenue growth (the longest contraction since 2008) while performance dispersion has widened sharply. Revenue growth variance, historically in the ~8–10 percentage point range before 2019, has expanded to 20–40 points post-COVID, with stark divergence between outperformers like Miu Miu (+40%) and underperformers like Gucci (–20%).

• The pandemic-era acceleration of e-commerce and digital storytelling in the luxury industry has structurally reshaped competition. Brands that invested early in scalable digital infrastructures and narrative architectures underpinned by strong content strategies and more efficient content operations have sustained momentum, while slower adopters have experienced erosion in both brand equity and sales.

• Content strategy has emerged as a predictive driver of performance. The It’s A Working Title LLC Content Strategy Excellence Index reveals a strong positive correlation between content quality—across narrative design, audience and channel fit, and shoppability—and top-line outcomes, positioning content-first strategies as leading indicators of revenue resilience and consumer loyalty.

• At It’s Working Title LLC, we have been crafting a new, practical methodology that fuses classic brand storytelling models with holistic content strategy, narrative design architecture, narrative game design, and transmedia storytelling principles. The result is FlexNarra℠, a flexible narrative architecture. This storytelling system helps luxury brands envision and structure both brand and marketing stories as expandable worlds, with beats, arcs, and mythologies (aka suprareferential constructs) that flex seamlessly across platforms and audiences. We’ll be sharing more soon.

It is now pretty widely reported that luxury sales, particularly ‘soft luxury’, have cooled off from the breakneck growth experienced during the industry-wide super cycle that followed the pandemic. Some of the industry’s biggest names are reporting some historically bad numbers. However, industry averages (or medians) mask another trend: a sharp increase in performance differentiation across luxury brands and product categories. If you like, average growth is slowing but the standard deviation of the industry’s performance is rising. There are some losers but also some remaining winners.

This period of performance differentiation is an amazing time to understand what it means to sell luxury products successfully. There was not too much to be learned during the 2019-23 supercycle, as everyone was growing. But why did some brands continue to earn customer loyalty while most have struggled in the past six quarters? A great deal has changed in the way luxury is marketed since the pandemic.

• After years of shying away from strong digital presences and e-commerce, most luxury brands have been forced to embrace them.

• Technology has transformed how brand stories are created and consumed. In fact, many brands jumped so fast and deep into digital that they were among the first to present themselves in video games and metaverses.

• Resale markets are now a thing that many brands now support on their own platforms.

• We have seen the rise and fall of platforms like Farfetch and YNAP.

Yet, why have some brands navigated these challenges successfully while others look a bit moribund? Numerous variables may explain this rising differentiation, but in our view, the most important is how well brands explain why consumers should care about their brand and articulate that ‘why’ consistently across digital and IRL consumer touchpoints. In short, brands that are winning with content are winning with consumers.

Who is doing well in luxury this year?

Let’s start by identifying which brands continue to win with consumers. Here, we looked at a large sample of earnings reports, readily available on company websites for public companies, for luxury fashion, jewelry, watches, cosmetics, and fragrance brands. We are excluding some other major verticals, such as eyewear, travel and wellness, and automobiles, for several reasons. In many cases, these brands have characteristics that make comparison with others in our sample difficult, and we can conduct a separate analysis later on that relies less on large-sample (Large-N) comparisons at a later stage.

Below we show annual revenue growth for the period of April to June 2025. (You can find our analysis for the full year 2024 and January to March 2025, which provides a similar comparison.) We cover 24 different public brands or quasi-brands. As LVMH and Richemont do not report individual brand data separately, we pulled out some high-level product categories that are reported: LVMH watches and jewelry, LVMH perfumes and cosmetics, LVMH fashion and leather goods, Richemont jewelry, and Richemont specialist watchmakers. This results in something different than a pure apples-to-apples comparison with the other brands (which themselves may be a mix of different types of products), but this is better than nothing and seems necessary given that LVMH and Richemont represent around 35 and 10 percent of the industry, respectively.

So of our 26 brands, 9 reported positive sales growth during the period of April to June 2025. These brands include Miu Miu, Brunello Cucinelli, Richemont Jewelry Maisons, Coach, Hermès, Stone Island, Ralph Lauren, Church’s, Tom Ford Fashions, and Zegna. The rest of the industry recorded negative growth with three brands (Stuart Wietzman, Thom Browne, and Gucci) recording 20+ percent declines in annual growth during the same period.

The luxury market is in recession, but there is pronounced volatility and dispersion across firms

At the industry level, luxury remains in recession. The plot below shows annual revenue growth for a weighted index of major luxury organizations. The plot displays a fairly lengthy time series that encompasses semi-annual growth before, during, and after the pandemic, and includes the It’s A Working Title LLC industry forecasts for the period from H2 2025 to H2 2026. The industry has reported negative revenue growth for about six consecutive quarters. By our count, the only other instance of this occurrence was during and after the 2008 global financial crisis. This is a historically unique slowdown.

Yet, as we saw in the revenue numbers for the latest quarter, the slowdown is not universal. In fact, there has never been a period in recent history when performance by luxury brands has been so heterogeneous. To get a sense of the heightened level of dispersion in performance, we created a violin plot below, which illustrates how luxury firms’ revenue growth was distributed across the industry from 2017 to the latest results in 2025. The vertical axis shows revenue growth in percentage terms for the luxury firms in our sample, while the width of the “violin” indicates the number of firms with results at that level. Taller, stretched violins indicate that firms’ performances were more scattered, while shorter, wider ones suggest they were more similar. The violin for the last two quarters is the longest over this nine-year period of time, and the thinness shows that there is relatively low clustering of similar results.

In fact since the pandemic, the volatility of luxury revenue growth has risen dramatically. Some standard measures of statistical variance point to this trend. The standard deviation of revenues, which shows the absolute spread of results, jumped from about 8–10 percentage points before 2019 to regularly above 20 and even into the 40s in recent periods. The coefficient of variation, which measures volatility relative to average growth, has spiked erratically since COVID—rising from around 0.7–1.0 before 2019 to levels above 2.0 and even near 4.0 in some recent half-years—showing that even strong years came with unstable performance. Meanwhile, the interquartile range—the spread between the middle 50 percent of firms—has widened from roughly 5–7 percentage points in the late 2010s to more than 12–13 percentage points after 2020, signaling that dispersion is no longer confined to a few outliers but now affects the core of the industry.

The changing nature of luxury content makes content strategy a key differentiator

The surge in volatility and dispersion among luxury firms since the pandemic can be traced to how differently companies adapted to a sudden digital pivot. Before 2020, luxury was one of the few consumer industries still relying heavily on physical boutiques and face-to-face experiences, with only a modest presence in e-commerce. When lockdowns hit, firms had to rapidly roll out digital storefronts, strengthen online storytelling, and build e-commerce platforms that could replicate aspects of the luxury experience. Some companies invested early and executed these digital shifts well, capturing new global customers and sustaining growth, while others lagged behind, struggling with technology, logistics, or brand fit in the online space. This uneven digital transition amplified performance gaps across the industry, adding to volatility already fueled by macroeconomic uncertainty and shifting consumer behavior. As a result, the post-pandemic luxury landscape is more fragmented, with leaders pulling away and laggards facing greater challenges than before.

The digital shift also put a premium on storytelling and content creation, giving firms with strong strategies in these areas a clear competitive edge. Luxury has always been about brand narrative and emotional connection, but in a physical boutique, that story is told through design, service, and environment. Online, however, the story has to be conveyed through digital campaigns, immersive websites, influencer partnerships, and seamless integration with social platforms. Companies that had already invested in compelling content and digital brand-building were able to translate their heritage into engaging online experiences and sustain consumer loyalty. By contrast, firms without well-developed content strategies struggled to differentiate themselves in crowded digital marketplaces, leading to weaker sales growth and a widening gap between leaders and followers in the post-pandemic period.

To illustrate the point, our latest release of the It’s A Working Title luxury Content Strategy Excellence index points to a strong positive correlation between brand-level content quality and revenue growth. This is the third update to the index since publicly launching a portion of our quantitative content strategy and marketing diagnostics to the public in a January 2025 white paper. The public version of the broader diagnostics that we present to clients scores brand content quality excellence across three dimensions: (1) narrative marketing quality, (2) audience targeting/channel fit, and (3) content shoppability.

The chart highlights clear contrasts in brand performance. Miu Miu remains the industry standout, combining one of the highest content excellence scores with revenue growth of about 40 percent, signaling strong alignment between digital strategy and commercial results. Hermès and Coach also demonstrate both high index scores and solid positive growth, reinforcing their leadership positions. In contrast, brands like Gucci, Versace, and Thom Browne continue to cluster at the lower end of the index and report negative growth, suggesting weaker content strategies may be weighing on performance. A middle group—including Burberry, Prada, and Michael Kors—sits near the regression line with moderate scores and modest growth, while Brunello Cucinelli and Richemont Jewelry overperform relative to their peers, posting strong growth despite not having the very highest index scores. Overall, the distribution shows a widening gap between leaders who have translated content excellence into revenue momentum and laggards who remain vulnerable.

Why Content-First Brand Strategy Wins for Brands and Consumers

We think that the increasing luxury industry performance distribution and the correlation between performance and content excellence suggest that it is not enough for brands to plan and publish content on their e-commerce site, social media posts, in-store advertising, or even influencer marketing content. One way to think about the relationship between quality content and customer experience is “received value,” or the actual value customers get from content, products, and experiences, rather than “perceived value,” or the value brands assume customers are getting. Received value is about how brands show up for their customers, whether they find value in the brand and products, and if they are willing to purchase products and return. Received value, rather than just perceived value, is where the rubber meets the road when discussing content marketing strategy vs. holistic content strategy for consumer-facing brands in retail, fashion, and luxury.

Content marketing strategy is important, but it does not differentiate a brand or even necessarily communicate its deep brand value proposition if it is not consistent, attenuated, and relatable. Holistic content strategy, on the other hand, is all about ensuring that a brand’s content aligns seamlessly with its values, narrative, and customer experience and with customer needs, preferences, and habits across every touchpoint.

Taking a content-first, rather than product- or brand-first, approach to brand strategy puts the customer, rather than the product, at the center of the communications equation, making it all about output and outcomes—e.g., the value and impact of brand storytelling to the consumer—rather than a brand's input or goals. This focus is not intended to devalue the brand’s vision and values. Quite the contrary, when connected to a holistic content strategy, a content-first brand strategy empowers brand stories through focusing, attenuating, and connecting them to concrete, measurable content performance indicators across and within channels in a way that is more readily linkable to internal KPIs like customer retention and acquisition targets and even sales goals, as our FSW Content Effectiveness Index illustrates.

If fashion and luxury brands want to distinguish themselves and come out ahead of the game after whatever slowdown is happening, they must adopt a content-first mindset. What does this involve? While we caution that every brand is in a different stage of content maturity, here are some steps that brands can consider:

1. Take a step back to assess your “why” for content and communicating with your customers (yes, both digitally and IRL). Are you taking a holistic approach to brand storytelling, utilizing multi-dimensional, dynamic, and channel-appropriate content with consistent but attenuated messaging that invites your customers to interact, contribute, and become part of your brand and its vision, lifestyle, and products? Are you using a top-down brand strategy and communications model and broadcasting your brand and product vision throughout your marketing and advertising?

2. Spend time to understand not just your general customer personas but the actual needs of your existing and prospective consumers. This should focus on studying customer content consumption habits and preferences, including, but not limited to, preferred content types, channel patterns, cadence and timing of content interactions, dwell time habits, cross-channel behavior, and content category and topic preferences.

3. Audit and evaluate your content and content processes, standards, templates, guidelines, systems, and tools within and across teams. This not only includes having a documented inventory of where all of your content lives, on what channel, and what team owns it but also documenting publishing processes for different teams, what tools they’re using to plan, manage, store, and publish content, what their cadence and calendar for publishing content is, and how they manage and oversee content production, quality, and editorial appropriateness. This audit process should include a content gap analysis, competition analysis, and a relook at the customer content consumption data you gathered during your early customer persona research process.

4. Articulate and document your North Star for content by identifying the unique value proposition of your brand in a way that is true to the company’s DNA, relevant to today’s market economy, and memorable to your target consumers. In practice, once you’ve defined your brand content “why,” then define your content vision and goals and specific qualitative and quantitative success measures so you know what you’re trying to do with content.

All of these steps form the foundation of your holistic content strategy. Of course, any experienced content strategist will tell you that more goes into a content strategy framework and operations model than the above steps.

In all, adopting a content-first brand strategy and investing in a holistic content strategy offers retail, fashion, and luxury brands a small path forward to not only differentiate themselves but also to get the right content (and, in turn, the right product) in front of the right customer at the right time on the right channel.

At It’s Working Title LLC, we have been crafting a new, practical methodology that fuses classic brand storytelling models with holistic content strategy, narrative design architecture, narrative game design, and transmedia storytelling principles. The result is FlexNarra℠, a flexible narrative architecture. This storytelling system helps luxury brands envision and structure both brand and marketing stories as expandable worlds, with beats, arcs, and mythologies (aka suprareferential constructs) that flex seamlessly across platforms and audiences. We’ll be sharing more soon.

Insights

• While AI offers transformative possibilities for content creation and customer experiences in the luxury sector, its adoption must be strategic. Without a clear purpose, AI risks producing generic, low-impact content that fails to resonate with luxury consumers.

• Holistic content strategy is essential for luxury brands to effectively integrate AI. This includes defining brand voice, goals, and audience needs to ensure AI-generated content aligns with the brand's vision and values, avoiding the pitfalls of "junk content."

• AI is reshaping how consumers discover and shop for luxury products online, with tools like agentic AI bots enhancing customer experiences. However, the success of such innovations depends on meaningful contextualization and structured content to support AI's capabilities.

• Luxury brands should prioritize authentic storytelling and human creativity over the "wow factor" of AI. High-quality, emotionally resonant content remains a key differentiator in building brand loyalty and exclusivity.

• Rather than replacing human creators, AI should be used to empower content teams by automating repetitive tasks, generating ideas, and enhancing efficiency. Human expertise and creativity remain irreplaceable in crafting compelling, original luxury brand narratives.

In the introduction to her novel Frankenstein, Mary Shelley writes of her vision for the story:

“I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion. Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavor to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world.”

This celebrated “ghost story” (as she calls it) imagines a ghastly future and questions the moral, ethical, and philosophical repercussions of humans trying to recreate “the effect of human endeavor” and play the role of god. (Watch this space for a review of Guillermo del Toro’s adaptation of Mary Shelley’s story later this fall.)

In the retail, fashion, and luxury space, we are currently amidst a not-so-quiet revolution in practical applications of artificial intelligence (AI) for business and commerce, thanks to the introduction of tools like generative AI (ChatGPT-5, Claude, Jasper, and the like), agentic AI, and related natural language/AI search engines from OpenAI, Google, Perplexity, and others.

In some camps, AI myth-making is in full force with tech enthusiasts now all over generative AI with gusto, pronouncing a new future of automated, machine-run content at scale wherein brands, marketers, and content creators can generate high-quality content at the push of a button.

Putting all the popular hype aside, AI, perhaps, more specifically, generative AI, offers real possibilities to transform—or disrupt, transmogrify, recreate, reimagine, and reconstitute—the business of content and commerce. It also may have real consequences for how we as humans use language for communication and how we articulate our ideas in writing, such as AI’s rampant usage of punctuation like emdashes and more formal vocabulary.

But, what does AI mean for luxury brands and how we shop online, never mind the future of content and brand storytelling? How do brands understand what is important about AI for luxury content and what is not in order to “avoid another disappointment like the metaverse,” as one client recently told us? How do we manage the risks of AI while taking advantage of the positives?

BCG says luxury experience “needs an AI moment” in order “to meet rapidly changing customer expectations, scale white-glove service, and shorten their learning curve,” but are they right? What does this actually mean in practice?

When it comes to luxury content, storytelling, and customer experience, we firmly believe that brands should approach technologies like AI with a mix of humility, humanity, curiosity, and awareness. As always with content, structure, meaning, intent, and context matter. Technology comes and goes. Luxury brand storytelling should be forever.

Agentic AI and Luxury Customer Experience

Ralph Lauren is the latest luxury brand to come out with a branded AI agent and tout its take on AI innovation. The “Ask Ralph” styling bot is all about frontline customer experience, allowing customers to ask questions and get styling and product recommendations. According to the Business of Fashion, the brand believes that what “makes its AI chatbot different from others to hit the market is that it leverages Ralph Lauren’s deep archive of content to offer inspiration and guidance on how to put pieces together into Ralph Lauren-approved outfits.”

This Ralph Lauren announcement comes on the heels of the MIT report that concludes 95% of generative AI pilots are failing, largely due to a lack of return on investment (ROI) and strategic corporate alignment. The “Ask Ralph” bot will be one to watch; but the critical question concerns the “why” for this type of innovation project in today’s luxury market. Despite all the marketing hype from major brands about their AI rollout or from the media that “AI shopping ‘agents’ set to transform ecommerce,” agentic AI for luxury clienteling is nothing new. Zegna has been using Zegna X behind the scenes for clienteling since 2023.

At times, the impulse towards AI-everything feels like the Metaverse 2.0. In retail contexts, consumers should be prepared for a lot of potentially generic, buggy tech that may or may not be useful for anything they are trying to do. All the media coverage of this Ralph Lauren agentic AI launch is the latest chapter in a long line of media announcements that this or that innovation in AI will capture consumer imagination and build brand loyalty.

As always with tech and customer experience design, our questions are: who are all of these AI innovations for? Do luxury consumers really care about having a branded bot? Do they actually care about having AI anything? Or do they just want fair prices, exclusive products, and better customer service?

As we have extensively explored in terms of the need for content-first approaches to retail tech, innovation within luxury needs to be appropriately and meaningfully contextualized within a brand, using technology to empower more human-focused customer experiences that actually drive value both for brands and customers.

To go back to the questions of who all these AI projects are for and whatdo brands actually need to make them scale and add value, the answer to those of us who have been working in content strategy for over two decades is hardly a mystery. Content strategy can bring meaning, value, and context to AI applications (and innovation in general) within brands, allowing technology to play a useful role in shaping consumer experience. Content strategy can improve the effectiveness of e-commerce, streamline data collection, more efficiently target the right consumers and improve user research and analysis, and, ultimately, garner better outcomes in terms of sales, product-based customer decisions, and overall brand growth.

AI Search, Structured Content, and the Semantic Future of Shopping

With headlines that companies like Lyst are refocusing their business models to focus on the AI-powered search for luxury shopping or that more luxury customers than ever are turning to TikTok and Instagram over Google for initial product discovery, it is clear that the luxury consumer e-commerce paradigm is shifting. Exactly which way it is shifting—whether into AI-driven models, offline experiences, social shopping, or some combination of the three—is up for significant debate. Nevertheless, it seems inescapable that AI is already playing a major role in changing how we find, discover, search, and shop for luxury products online and, in turn, what we think of the brands that sell them.

The problem with the rapid adoption of AI in luxury e-commerce contexts is that most luxury content is unstructured and not backed by foundational semantic ontologies or knowledge graphs to define and integrate domain knowledge, codify and connect data, and explain retrieval logic to drive more useful, contextualized AI outputs. AI thrives on the meaningful associations and architecture of structured content to “reason” and help make sense of a morass of information and data. In spite of the acceleration in AI “innovations” across the luxury sector, there unfortunately is minimal investment in holistic content strategy and structured content as foundational operational infrastructure, even among brands that have taken the time to formalize how they approach product inventory management and digital asset management.

(For background on how AI and natural language search works, we highly recommend Deborah Carver’s excellent work for The Content Technologist, such as her piece, “How does AI make sense of language?”)

To add to the chaos, many tech providers and content marketers are trying to convince brands that they need “Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)” to build “AI readiness” or “AI search optimization” as a way to shift their SEO/SEM budgets. Anyone who has spend five minutes studying how AI search works will tell you that this is a marketing ploy designed to obfuscate rather than educate.

The simple fact is that the best way to ready your brand content (which includes your PDP or production description pages, social media posts, and more editorial brand storytelling) for the new world of AI search is to invest in quality, authentic content that describes what you do, how you are different, what you sell, and why you do what you do.

In short, luxury brands need holistic content strategy and content operations to drive meaningful, contextualized applications of AI that actually make sense for their corporate vision, their products, and their target consumers.

When it comes to tech and AI, content strategy is also essential corporate risk mitigation. How do luxury brands protect their data, their customers’ data, and their systems and tools, and weather external factors like cyberattacks, phishing, and copyright infringement? A strong content strategy is a form of risk management, embedding governance, policies, metadata standards, and workflows that by their nature protect sensitive brand and customer data. Through prioritizing privacy, consistency, and ethical oversight, content strategy reduces the risk of data breaches, reputational damage, and misaligned personalization. It also functions to future-proof luxury brands against evolving global regulations, ensuring secure scalability and sustained consumer trust.

AI and the Shape of Luxury Storytelling

From a marketing and communications angle, the future of AI and luxury content is still being written. We cannot with any confidence predict a future of fully autonomous brand marketing and social content (or “liquid content” as Matthieu Lorrain at Google DeepMind calls it) any more than we can say it is just a passing trend (or one that will truly devastate the modeling industry). This is not to say that the uncanny ability of ChatGPT to write strong product descriptions, Instagram posts, and marketing campaigns should be ignored; but rather that this capability needs to be thought through, interpreted, and incorporated into a wider brand content strategy in order to be properly operationalized.

In short, for luxury brands, where will the most value-add for AI-driven content arise? It’s hard to say at this point. But, there are some best practices emerging for AI applications for content and content strategy.

Before you use AI, invest in content strategy.

If your brand is already struggling to produce and manage content across channels and does not have in place a foundational content strategy to drive content decision making and planning over time, then AI could actually make things worse. Why? You could easily lose customers if the AI is not properly trained in your brand voice and produces content that is not well targeted to your vision, your product, and, well, your words.

Automating content without purpose or vision basically turns whatever output the AI generates into junk content that won’t resonate or have any impact on your target audiences.

Know what content problem you need the AI to solve.

Following on from the idea of junk content, using AI for AI’s sake is not a great choice when it comes to content for brands of any size. This is why we continually recommend approaching AI tools with a strong strategy with a set of clear vision-based goals and success measures in hand.

Is it a good thing for ChatGPT to write all your Instagram posts? If you’ve been having interns handle Instagram for years and it isn’t a priority channel, that’s one thing.

But, if you’re a luxury brand all about exclusivity, provenance, and quality, then considering an investment in AI for content is an entirely different matter. For fashion and luxury brands, authentic, quality content that empowers and enriches your brand story across channels is arguably your biggest asset. So, relying on an AI author to create your social media posts as a luxury brand may not be the best move.

That said, if you’re a luxury retailer struggling to keep up with the pace of writing product descriptions every time you introduce a new product, generative AI is a perfect tool to help your content teams automate and templatize laborious content creation processes. Or, if you’re a luxury marketer trying to understand the history of a specific trend, AI can give you a quick comprehensive deep dive into any particular topic.

Focus on storytelling, not the tech wow factor.

Tell better stories across platforms. Use beautiful words to bring beautiful clothes to life. If you want to differentiate your brand from your competitors, focus on:

• Identifying your target audiences and how they are similar and different

• Understanding what these audiences need, the types of content they prefer, and the patterns in how they consumer it—in other words, your customer journeys

• Delineating your brand content vision and goals

• Identifying all your brand content touchpoints, both for digital channels and IRL ones from your website to retail stores and influencer marketing partnerships

In our opinion, the future of fashion criticism and trends analysis is now more critical than ever to provide educated, historically-situated, experience-driven insights about the fashion and luxury industry. These are expert functions that no AI can fulfill.

Given where we are with AI technologies, by all means, use AI to ideate if you get stuck or to generate new ideas if you are feeling spontaneous. Or even, use AI for UX to generate personas, conduct ideal-state user research, and write user stories. But, don’t rely on AI to write and deliver all your brand messaging if you want to build meaningful relationships with consumers and to give them reasons to keep engaging and coming back.

Empower your content teams.

Do not take the easy way out and think that AI is more powerful to reach consumers than the writers, editors, social media strategists, and marketers team you currently have on staff.

The current state of AI runs out of steam in creating what we can only call vaguely “high-quality, original content based on the vicissitudes and unpredictabilities of actual human experience.” AI cannot live a life for you. Even if you ask AI to write a sea shanty, it still lacks the spontaneity and imaginativeness of human-written poetry. AI takes a formulaic, slightly personality-less approach to content creation and is only as good as the information and data that went into its inputs, which is not necessarily the best formula for luxury brands looking to make clothing feel desirable and exclusive to drive consumers to purchase.

Want a new future for luxury content? Build a content strategy and give your existing teams more opportunities to collaborate and develop innovative stories, build connections, and create meaningful experiences for your consumers. AI is a fascinating tool to help creators imagine new possibilities and build new worlds; but, it needs supervision and nuancing in order to situate it most powerfully within an organization.

In this third installment of FSW Conversations en Été, Bryce and Jessica speak with Laura Lanteri, a strategist, creative director, and filmmaker with nearly 20 years of experience in fashion, luxury, and tech with nearly 20 years of experience in fashion, luxury, and tech. She has led campaigns for Louis Vuitton, Gucci, and Hermès, and now operates her own agency. Laura teaches at Parsons and is currently directing a documentary exploring beauty, capitalism, and freedom of expression in America, using film to challenge and reshape harmful narratives in fashion and culture.

During this rich conversation, Laura talks in depth about her latest project, a documentary exploring beauty, capitalism, and freedom of expression in America, using film to challenge and reshape harmful narratives in fashion and culture.

Access the full episode below.

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FSW Conversations is a publication of It’s A Working Title LLC and is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or on your preferred podcasting platform.

In this second installment of FSW Conversations en Été, our co-publishers, Jessica Quillin and Bryce Quillin, sit down with Suad Fakih, writer of the popular Substack Suad’s Gems and an expert in the future of luxury at the intersection of capital culture, tech, and consumer behavior. Suad discusses her rich background as a successful founder, commodities trader, and advisor, bringing a fresh perspective to our limited edition summer series.

In this wide-ranging conversation, Suad explores the shifting landscape of the luxury economy, noting that the industry faces not only macroeconomic and geopolitical challenges but also deep structural changes. The erosion of consumer trust, rising prices, and a growing demand for transparency are reshaping brand dynamics in real time. Additionally, resale markets are expanding, and consumer mindsets are constantly evolving. As Suad discusses, while some brands are staying staying true to their core values to safeguard credibility, others are faltering through overextension or lack of innovation.

Suad also explains in depth how post-COVID shifts in luxury consumer behavior reveal a generational divide, with Gen Z favoring offline experiences, community-driven interactions, and brands that reflect their values. Younger consumers demand authenticity and purpose, while ultra-high-net-worth and high-net-worth individuals influence brand strategies across global markets. Suad emphasizes that understanding these current trends, rather than predicting the future, is critical to thriving in the evolving luxury landscape, especially amid the rise of AI, fashion tech, and early-stage innovations in e-commerce and customer journeys.

In this conversation, Suad also explores how generational change also shapes design, marketing, and brand purpose. She highlights how Hermès and Loewe maintain cultural relevance by balancing tradition with modernity, and urges brands to focus on psychographics over demographics. The conversation underscores the need to meet evolving consumer expectations without diluting heritage, serving both younger, trend-focused buyers and older, loyalty-driven clientele. Suad’s insights offer a clear-eyed view of the industry’s challenges and opportunities, inspiring strategic thinking for the future of luxury.

We would love to hear your thoughts on the episode. Email jessica@fashionstrategyweekly.com to share your insights.

Access the full video podcast via the link above or the audio version on one of the channels below:

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FSW Conversations en Été is a publication of It’s A Working Title LLC, a strategy, research, and content studio for fashion, luxury, and cultural brands.

The global luxury industry is slowing down but Gen Z is not.

Luxury’s youngest consumers are rewriting the rules of what luxury actually means. They are prioritizing authenticity over aspiration, experiences over exclusivity, and sustainability over status. In a shifting, uncertain market, traditional luxury strategies are no longer enough, which means brands must evolve to keep up.

To explore these themes, we are proud to release our latest white paper, created in collaboration with CarbonPal:

Download: Beyond Tradition—Evolving Operations and Content to Captivate Gen Z

Why This Paper Now?

2024 marked the first broad slowdown in luxury sales in two decades (excluding crisis years), and early signs suggest the trend is far from over. Many legacy brands remain operationally siloed, content-saturated, and digitally sluggish, which is a problem when Gen Z expects seamless personalization, smart storytelling, and genuine values on every touchpoint and in every customer interaction.

This white paper explores the three intersecting forces luxury brands must address now:

1. Content that connects:
   Modern consumers hunger for unique voices and scroll past sameness. In this paper, we explore why emotionally intelligent, culturally relevant brand storytelling must replace volume-driven content marketing.

2. Operational transformation:
   Disconnected systems and internal inefficiencies are no longer tolerable for luxury brands. Agility is king; and AI-driven data use is no longer optional.

3. Sustainability as strategy:
   Gen Z does not believe in surface-level greenwashing. Brands need supply chain optimization and purpose-led strategic decision-making that delivers real impact.

Who This Is For

If you are a luxury strategist, marketer, operations lead, or C-suite leader, this paper is a tool to help you:

• Understand what Gen Z actually wants from luxury

• Reframe content strategy as a business enabler—not just a communications function

• Rethink operations, data, and AI as growth drivers

• Future-proof your brand while holding onto what makes it timeless

Download the Paper

📄 Click here to download Beyond Tradition: Evolving Operations and Content to Captivate Gen Z and get insights into how luxury can move forward without losing its soul.

💬 We’d love to hear your thoughts. What resonated? What are you struggling with? Email us or leave a comment.

—

Fashion Strategy Weekly is published by It’s A Working Title LLC, a strategy, research, and content studio for fashion, luxury, and cultural brands.

In this episode, our co-publishers, Jessica Quillin and Bryce Quillin, speak with Mario Lang, Executive Director of Global Retail Technology at The Estée Lauder Companies.

Mario is a global technology and supply chain leader with over 20 years of experience driving digital transformation and innovation for iconic brands like Hugo Boss, Ralph Lauren, Tommy Hilfiger, Tom Ford, and Balmain Beauty. Known for aligning cutting-edge tech with business strategy, Mario has led global initiatives that enhance customer experiences, optimize value chains, and future-proof operations across retail, marketing, and e-commerce.

Global retail, fashion, and luxury brands are facing many challenges to stay relevant and to anticipate and cater to changing consumer needs across key demographics.

During our conversation, Mario speaks of the need for contextualized, meaningful applications of retail technology, including AI, DPPs, and other innovations. He emphasizes the importance of technology as a tool that can augment human discovery, bring operational efficiencies, and contribute to better, more consumer-centric retail experiences, rather than just innovation for innovation’s sake.

We would love to hear your thoughts on the episode: email jessica@fashionstrategyweekly.com.

Access the full video podcast via the link above or the audio version on one of the channels below:

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

FSW Conversations en Été is a publication of It’s A Working Title LLC, a strategy, research, and content studio for fashion, luxury, and cultural brands.

FSW Conversations en Été brings together fashion and luxury leaders, creatives, and makers to discuss practical, strategic, and research-based insights to help you, our listeners, keep on top of our fast-moving sector.

Some highlights of this upcoming short season include:

• We chat with Mario Lang, a global technology and supply chain leader with over 20 years of experience driving digital transformation and innovation for iconic brands like Hugo Boss, Ralph Lauren, Tommy Hilfiger, Tom Ford, and Balmain Beauty. Known for aligning cutting-edge tech with business strategy, Mario has led global initiatives that enhance customer experiences, optimize value chains, and future-proof operations across retail, marketing, and e-commerce.

• We speak with Suad Fakih, who writes about the future of luxury, particularly where capital, culture, tech, and consumer behavior collide. Her newsletter, Suad’s Gems, spotlights the founders and investors who are reshaping the fashion, beauty, and wellness industries. She leads the Venture Success Committee at Marula Square and advises brands on growth and investment strategies. Previously, she has been a successful founder, commodities trader, and advisor to VCs, family officers, and founders.

• We talk with Laura Lanteri, strategist, creative director, and filmmaker with nearly 20 years of experience in fashion, luxury, and tech. She has led campaigns for Louis Vuitton, Gucci, and Hermès, and runs her own agency. She teaches at Parsons and is currently directing a documentary exploring beauty, capitalism, and freedom of expression in America, using film to challenge and reshape harmful narratives in fashion and culture.

• Finally, we chat with Jacques Roizen, who leads DLG (Digital Luxury Group)'s research and consulting business and helps brands elevate their digital strategies and digital operations in China.

Episodes of FSW Conversations en Été will release on Tuesdays throughout the month of August. Stay tuned for episode 1, coming on 5 August.

FSW Conversations en Été is a publication of It’s A Working Title LLC and is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and all major podcasting platforms.

We are excited to share more about our next chapter with you. In the full spirit of transparency, we are taking a gamble to build in public, which is why we are sharing this behind-the-scenes video with you.

In 2023, we started Fashion Strategy Weekly as an experiment, sensing a dearth of practical, actionable B2B insights for fashion and luxury decision-makers. We have written over 150 articles about the landscape of luxury, fashion, and retail, most of which are centered around content strategy, contextualized technology, macroeconomics, and brand storytelling, aka brand world building. Sometimes, we even dare to write about marketing. But, in all cases, we aimed to provide actionable insights.

As our readers know, we believe strongly that content is an everywhere thing, not just a digital thing, and thus is critical to how luxury brands tell stories, communicate to consumers, differentiate themselves from other brands, and sell products. Oh and we concocted the idea of IRL+ content strategy, or broad-based content strategy in physical space, to emphasize the deep connections between brand messaging, clienteling, and customer experience.

We have published several white papers over the last two years. We have grown our media work into two seasons of a podcast and soon a limited-run summer video series and have even appeared on CNN talking about the next phase of luxury after the Prada-Versace merger.

After two years of writing, listening, and learning to our readers and clients, we have decided to make the move to expand Fashion Strategy Weekly into something deeper and hopefully more significant. We are creating a new, bigger experience and will be moving a lot of our richer content off Substack, though this site will continue to exist as a newsletter.

As we explain in our video, our new project is titled Untitled by It’s A Working Title. It will look towards the current and future state of luxury strategy across verticals—whether fashion and leather goods, beauty and fragrance, jewelry and watches, travel and hospitality, automotive, home and interior design, fitness and wellness, wine and spirits—through the lens of cultural criticism, aiming to contextualize the “what” with a concrete “why” and “how.” Untitled by IWT will be more cultural journal than magazine or news digest, full of unapologetically intellectual inquiry, real stories, authentic insights, and lines of enquiry that are always grounded through the honest practice of a researcher’s lens.