If you read my New Year's post you probably remember me telling you that I got my master's degree a few weeks ago. It was a really hard year for me, with a lot of work, but when you like what you do it's extremely rewarding. During the last few years I've become very passionate about luxury marketing and I decided to write first my bachelor's thesis and then my master's thesis in this area.
Several hundreds of books, articles, websites, blogs, interviews and statistic manipulations later I finished my research! First, I was curious to see whether countries with different traditions concerning luxury behave differently and have different incentives when they decide to purchase luxury goods (and for this I compared France and Romania). Second, I was interested in the main factors that influence consumers' decision to purchase a luxury product and especially in the impact of personal and social factors (whether consumers purchase a luxury product for themselves because they like the design or the quality or because they simply want to show off in front of their peers). In order to get a whole view on the matter at hand, I also questioned some other ideas such as the level of counterfeit purchase or the importance of the country of origin of a luxury product. There were indeed some differences between the two countries that I studied, such as for example that in Romania there is a higher percentage of consumers that purchase luxury products in order to show them off, than because of their other attributes, which is less the case in France. On the other hand, Romanian luxury consumers seem to be more knowledgeable of the country of origin of certain luxury brands than the French ones, each country has its good and bad points. All in all, it was very rewarding to get some results after all my hard work.
Maybe you're wondering what this story has to do with the photos... Well, a few days before presenting my results I had an idea that would set me apart from other students. I thought to myself: "My thesis is about luxury. Luxury is supposed to be something that is one of a kind, something made to measure especially for every single customer - then why not create unique hand-made covers for the thesis for my two supervisors!" These are some of the sketches and the final result:
 |
| Early sketches |
 |
| My friend Laura the mastermind of the designs and our chocolate chip cookies |
 |
| My friend Laura in design mode |
 |
| More extreme design mode |
My professors were indeed impressed when they saw their personalized covers, so "Mission: Cover Design" was very successful! A huge THANK YOU to my amazing friend Laura (our architect-to-be), who took all the design work in her hands and did a fabulous job!
