Jim Stevenson – business marketing technology

Maybe this post should have been titled “How to damage your Luxury Brand by overly aggressive brand protection”

There are a number of issues, which Luxury Brands have to consider:

• How do you recreate your luxury brand experience online;
• If you get it wrong your Brand has a lot to lose;
• Do you carry out Digital Marketing when getting it wrong is so easy;
• Do you have even more to lose if you don’t do Digital Marketing?

There are also issues of how do you protect your luxury brand from a number of threats: cyber squatting, drop catching, brand abuses etc.

But and it’s a big but, there are those occasions where a Brand Abuser uses your brand for a good cause, although maybe not in a way you wish your brand to be associated with that cause.

That is just the case with Louis Vuitton and Nadia Plesner.

Nadia Plesner is an artist who decided to raise awareness and funds for the ongoing genocide in Darfur. She decided to use her skills in creating an image of a Darfur national in a Paris Hilton style pose with a little dog and a designer handbag.

Louis Vuitton, naturally wish to protect their brand image and as their letter to Nadia Plesner stated their Intellectual Rights. They sent a very polite letter asking that Ms Plesner respects the rights of the original artists who created the design and that she stops using the image.

Ms Plesner wrote back with an equally polite letter stating that she had the right of artistic expression and that while the bag may appear similar it does not include any Louis Vuitton logos or name. She also cited an example of Polish artist Zbigniew Libera who was inspired by Lego sets for another art piece.

I can see both points of view.

While protecting your brand is a natural reaction it does appear that this course of action has not been thought through.

By escalating the situation into a law suit you could easily say  ”Louis Vuitton don’t care about Darfur.” While this is a big statement and probably not true, their overly protective stance does come across as ‘we don’t care about Darfur we only care about us!’

It appears that Louis Vuitton have chosen to take a no nonsense approach to Brand protection, a position I normally agree with where the Brand abuser is motivated by commercial gain at the expense of the Brand.

However as I said at the start there is a big but in this instance.  The Brand Abuser is trying to do good, any Brand should wish to be associated with that.  

Legal action should always be a last resort and never ever should in be left on it’s own, there should always be a Brand or PR representative included in the Legal Team to manage the public perspective of the legal action.  This is especially true in a Web 2.0 environment.

So maybe rather than allowing the legal team to do what they do best the Brand Team should have stepped in and managed the situation.  If legal action typically costs $50,000 that leaves a lot of flexibility for the Brand Team to manage the situation without the bad publicity.

I believe that while this situation is a negative to the Brand it can be easily turned into a positive.  Rather than try and stop the sale of the T-Shirts Louis Vuitton could easily have paid the Artist for her trouble to amend the image so that it was less like the Louis Vuitton bag and then support the cause by either making a donation or taking the image and using it on there own products etc.  The correct course of action would depend on how much association they wished with the cause.  Darfur, while it is a humanitarian disaster it also has a lot of political issues which a Brand may not wish to take a stance on.  An anonymous donation may be appropriate to help with the humanitarian issues while not taking a stance on the political ones.

You can find the website at http://www.nadiaplesner.com/ which will let you see the T-Shirts in question as well a link through to the letter from Louis Vuitton, the reply etc.

What would you have done it you were Louis Vuitton?