FSW Luxury Playbook for 2025: Welcome to the Year of Content-First Brand Strategy
How a changing luxury economy will change luxury strategy
“Luxury is a culture, which means you have to understand it to be able to practice it with flair and spontaneity."
- Kapferer and Bastien, “The Luxury Strategy: Break the Rules of Marketing to Build Luxury Brands”
Insights
As was widely anticipated, 2024 saw the end of the historic post-pandemic retail luxury supercycle, which lifted most (but not all) industry boats. It was also a year of pronounced industry differentiation where some brands continued to meet or exceed expectations. The factors driving this differentiation are highly instructive for the future and are the chief concern of our 2025 luxury industry preview.
The fashion and luxury brands winning with content are winning with consumers. In this report, we introduce our first-ever FSW Content Effectiveness Index, which shows a positive correlation between fashion and luxury brand content effectiveness and top-line revenue growth for most brands that experienced growth in 2025.
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.
In 2025, marketing tactics must be framed and contextualized within a holistic, business-focused, content-first brand strategy. Content strategy is brand strategy in action, and content operations are its engine.
Last year was one of contrasts for the luxury industry. On the one hand, luxury fashion is likely to have experienced its first annual decline in sales in 20 years outside of the pandemic and global financial crisis-hit years. On the other hand, many brands continued to record strong sales and provided compelling customer engagement across product lines and geographies.
There is a general feeling that luxury is at a turning point. Some commentators argue that consumers have tired of luxury after several years of record-setting growth, perhaps questioning the creativity and quality of many products whose rising prices have put off even some traditionally price-inelastic consumers. The view that the industry is at a crisis point has reached beyond close industry watchers and was picked up across the popular press as 2024 progressed. The long list of creative director turnovers contributed to this sense of instability and lack of direction. In contrast, the year also brought us some amazing brand storytelling that resonated with consumers across various digital and in-store distribution points.
While there are ups and downs in every industry in a given year, last year seemed to be one of an usually high degree of luxury industry dispersion. Perhaps the differentiation seems especially pronounced after three years of explosive growth following the pandemic. Consumers’ voracious demand for luxury lifted all (or at least most) boats. Perhaps last year reflected the going out of the tide and we can now see which brands were swimming by working hard to engage consumers with quality brand stories and effective content strategy and which were not.
In this report, we present our first-ever Fashion Strategy Weekly Content Effectiveness Index. This novel metric provides a quantitative assessment of the quality of fashion and luxury brands’ content engagement across several dimensions. It teaches us that effective content was positively correlated with strong sales growth in 2024. Luxury is an industry built on storytelling. Our analysis will make the case that even good stories will not beguile consumers and drive engagement if a strong content strategy does not underpin them.
Ultimately, this annual look ahead is not about guessing what will happen next year. In our experience, high-level industry forecasts are typically wrong anyway, and particularly struggle to predict turning points correctly. Rather, it is about laying out how brands can shift their approaches to engaging their markets through the art and science of content strategy. This is what the winners of 2024 did.
Download the full report below.