Luxury Marketing for Royalty: The Queen of Royal Branding
This month saw Queen Elizabeth II celebrate her 90th birthday. Aside from curtseying our respects for reaching such an impressive milestone, we thought it a good opportunity to look at how she, and other members of the Royal family, continue to influence the world of luxury marketing, now worth an estimated £167 billion.
She has reigned for 64 of those illustrious years. That’s over half a century as one of the most recognisable and influential people on the planet – which, by anyone’s calculations, is an incredibly long time to have inspired and triggered all sorts of luxury business trends.
Top of the list must be the fashion industry. As one of the most photographed people of all time, her outfits have been a source of scrutiny for decades. So much so, that a new exhibition has opened this month, first in Scotland and travelling to London later in the year: Fashioning a Reign: 90 Years of Style from the Queen’s Wardrobe. Vogue have written a good piece on this, cataloguing how the Queen’s image has ebbed and flowed to reflect the many changes in women’s fashion since the 1950s.
The most obvious instance of the Queen directly influencing luxury marketing in the fashion industry can be seen in some of Dolce & Gabbana’s 2008 collection, where the Italian fashion powerhouse claimed to have been directly inspired by her style. And that’s not a one off. Apparently, this autumn we’ll all be wearing block colours and tartan prints from the likes of Chanel, Gucci and Burberry – all inspired, once again, by Her Majesty.
Away from the world of frocks and fascinators, the Queen’s next biggest (and most diverse) area of influence is via The Royal Warrant. This is the royal seal of approval that can only be granted by the Queen, her husband the Prince of Edinburgh and her son, the Prince of Wales. It’s given to businesses that have supplied the royal household for at least five years. To date, they have granted 883 Royal Warrants and the list of businesses is, as you might imagine, amazingly diverse.