The Survival of Fashion Luxury Brand When the Designer Changing: How to Balance Design and Market in Order to Maintain Brand Value

Fashion designer is one of dominate role in a fashion luxury brand. There are many cases that luxury fashion brand via recruiting a creative designer to revive their commercial empire. For example, Tom Ford capitalizes on ten years to make nearly bankrupt Gucci resurge, even become a bellwether that value 4.3 billion market cap in the luxury industry[1]. But, that is not mean every designer could be lucky to cooperate with a brand that match his or her design style, such as the transitory cooperation of Kalvin Klein and Raf Simons. Thus, except the cooperation situation of designer and company, the other critical factor to determinate one designer whether match a brand is the balance between design and marketing. This report examines the plight of fashion luxury brand when designer changing. And explore how to remedy the loosing of brand core competitiveness and discuss a sires of reasons why new design concept useless for sales improvement, also, how to utilize marketing strategy such as visual communication to maintain brand equity. In this paper, the author conducted a series of comprehensive methodologies such as content analysis, historical research and case study to probe the role of designer for luxury brands and describes that marketing strategy might contribute to protect brand value in the period of brand upgrading. The research finding that, whilst designer changing, the visual marketing could be an effective method to help luxury fashion brand tide over difficulties, whole visual presenting of brand could maintain the impression in customer mind.