Opinion / Why are luxury iPhone accessories costlier than the Apple phone itself? Louis Vuitton, Hermès and Dior fans are willing to splurge – and Added Luxury Value is why
- We perceive a person in a Bentley wearing Chanel and Patek Philippe to be smarter and more attractive than someone in a VW in H&M and a Swatch, studies show
- The extreme value that luxury consumers attach to their favoured products is a result of the brand story and how it colours our perceptions
This article is part of Style’s Inside Luxury Column
The iPhone changed the world more than almost any other product did before. We already had mobile phones, but the iPhone changed how we interact with a mobile device, what we can do with it, and how we access information. An iPhone is much more than a phone. It is a connection to the cloud, linking us to an ever-growing wealth of data, people, applications and computing power. It’s like connecting a super computer to our brains, using our eyes, voice and fingers as input and output devices. While nothing that an iPhone can do would surprise us today, anybody confronted with one 20 or 30 years ago would have thought it something magical and beyond imagination.
How can it be that when Apple recently started selling phones above US$1,000, there was a media outcry, but much higher prices for luxury phone carriers or cases seem totally normal?
The answer taps into the core of luxury. It would be myopic to describe luxury simply as “expensive”. To define luxury that way is to misunderstand the real reasons that brands like Dior and Louis Vuitton can charge more than Apple for products that are less complex and far less world-changing than the iPhone. The word “expensive” also implies a judgment.
Let’s approach it from a different angle: what if the price for the Dior bag is not “expensive”, but a reflection of the value the bag provides? What if the iPhone provides a US$1,000 value and the Dior bag provides, in the eyes of a consumer, a US$2,500 value?
