Correspondence: Hugues Cailleux, Pernod-Ricard Chair on Management of Prestige Brands, HEC Paris, 1 Rue de la Liberation, Jouy en Josas 78350, Paris, France

¹holds an MBA from HEC Paris. His master's thesis focused on the specifi city of CRM in the context of the luxury business. He is now a consultant at Accenture specialising in CRM.

²holds an MBA from HEC Paris. His master's thesis focused on the specifi city of CRM in the context of the luxury business. He has now established himself as a freelance consultant.

³is Professor at HEC Paris, Europe's Luxury research centre. He holds the Pernod Ricard Chair on Luxury brand management and regularly gives seminars on luxury in the United States, China, Japan, Korea and India. He has just published The Luxury Strategy: Breaking the Rules of Marketing to Build Luxury Brands (Kogan Page ed.) with V. Bastien.

Received 11 September 2008; Revised 11 September 2008.

Abstract

Luxury brands have so far been reluctant to adopt any of the classical tools of mass marketing. One of these is customer relationship management (CRM). Prestigious brands are, however, now starting to examine the benefits of the 'lifelong customer value' approach, beyond building the social prestige of their names. This paper develops 'why' luxury brands need to apply CRM systems and 'what' they could achieve by doing so, and addresses 'how' this could be applied with the necessary adaptations if these brands wish to keep their luxury status intact.