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Entrepreneur
2 days ago
- Business
- Entrepreneur
The Expensive Wake-up Call That Changed My Perspective: Why Silence Works Better Than Ads in the Luxury Market
Why the most successful luxury platforms are built in silence, not with splashy launches. A firsthand look at the rise of 'invisible marketing' in high-end markets. Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own. You're reading Entrepreneur Europe, an international franchise of Entrepreneur Media. The luxury world isn't going digital. It's going dark. When visibility becomes a liability, the smartest marketing strategy might be no marketing at all. Last summer, I received an email from the CMO of a heritage fashion house. She wanted to partner on a "next-gen luxury experience": a digital launch backed by influencers, Meta ads, and a seven-figure press tour. Five years ago, I would have replied within five minutes. Today, I never even sent the proposal. The reason? I've spent the past 12 months quietly building a luxury platform that doesn't rely on traditional promotion. No paid ads. No influencers. No press blitz. The homepage isn't even indexed by Google yet. Early partnership discussions suggest this approach is working, though it's too early to claim victory. This isn't a stunt. It's a strategy rooted in a painful lesson about how luxury consumers actually behave. The expensive wake-up call that changed my perspective In 2023, my agency secured what seemed like a dream project: marketing luxury real estate developments across southern Europe. We had everything—serious production budget, paid media allocation and exclusive inventory. Our campaign reached millions of targeted impressions with above-average engagement rates. We generated exactly zero qualified leads. Not low conversions. Zero. When we interviewed target customers afterward, their feedback was brutal. The most common response? "If I saw it advertised online, it can't be that exclusive." One family office advisor in Geneva put it bluntly: "The properties we actually buy aren't on Instagram." That failure cost us the client and nearly £200,000 in sunk costs. But it taught me something invaluable. In ultra-high-net-worth circles, visibility had become a liability. The invisible economy I discovered Over the next six months, I interviewed family offices, boutique hotel owners, and luxury service providers across Europe. The pattern was consistent: the best-performing businesses weren't optimizing for reach. They were optimizing for invisibility. This shift isn't just anecdotal. Private banking reports consistently show ultra-high-net-worth individuals increasingly valuing discretion over display. The most successful luxury businesses I studied had already adapted to this reality. One Monaco concierge doubled revenue after shutting down its Instagram and moving to WhatsApp-only. A yacht charter platform built a multi-million business through invitation-only Telegram groups with just a few hundred members. These weren't marketing tactics. They represented an entirely different philosophy. But here's what surprised me most: not everything worked this way. I also found plenty of failures. A Swiss watch dealer lost 40% of revenue trying to go "too exclusive." A London art gallery's members-only strategy backfired when they couldn't generate enough word-of-mouth. The lesson? Invisibility only works when you have something genuinely worth hiding. My three-phase experiment (and what went wrong) Inspired by these findings, I began developing my own test: a platform built on radical privacy principles. Instead of following the startup playbook, I reversed every step. Phase 1: Silent testing I built a basic prototype without branding or analytics. No domain announcements. No team updates. I personally reached out to 15 potential users who collectively managed significant discretionary spending. The early results were promising. Within 72 hours, most had shared it with their networks. But I also made mistakes. My initial interface was too complex. Three users dropped off immediately because the onboarding took 20 minutes. Phase 2: Controlled expansion Rather than opening registrations, I made access harder. New users needed referrals. Registration required video calls. This friction had mixed results. Yes, it created exclusivity. But it also frustrated legitimate users. One potential partner, a luxury travel curator I'd worked with before, gave up after the third step. I had to manually onboard her and redesign the entire process. At one point, I nearly made a fatal mistake. I considered launching with a viral waitlist campaign: "10,000 spots for the world's most exclusive platform." My finger was literally hovering over the publish button when I realized this would destroy everything we'd built. The contradiction would have killed our credibility overnight. Phase 3: Strategic partnerships Instead of traditional B2B sales, I focused on "silent partnerships." No announcements. No case studies. Just direct value exchange with select partners. This is where the model started clicking. I've been applying these principles with testing whether a platform built on invisibility could actually create more value than one built on virality. But even then, two partnerships failed because I couldn't provide the social proof they needed for internal buy-in. Invisibility has its costs. What entrepreneurs can actually take away Through this experiment, I've identified principles that apply beyond luxury markets: Not every product needs a launch. Test with five ideal customers before you tell 5,000 strangers. Early users shape products better than early publicity. Friction can be a feature. The right obstacles filter for the right audience. But know the difference between valuable friction and poor user experience. Some metrics matter more than others. I track "invitation scarcity": how many users could invite others but choose not to. High scarcity often signals high value perception. Failure teaches more than success. My biggest learnings came from the watch dealer who went too exclusive and the gallery that couldn't generate organic growth. Study both extremes. The counterintuitive path forward We're entering an era where certain audiences actively avoid findable brands. They don't want to discover products; they want products to be revealed to them through trusted sources. This doesn't work for every business. Most companies still need traditional marketing. But for specific segments, particularly those serving privacy-conscious affluent consumers, the old rules are reversing. Luxury consumers increasingly interpret easy access as low value. The path forward isn't about shouting louder. It's about knowing when to whisper and when to stay completely silent. Six months ago, that fashion house CMO reached out again. She'd heard about what we were building through her network. This time, she didn't want a campaign. She wanted to understand how to disappear. Some brands chase attention. Others choose to be discovered only by the few who matter. In today's market, the rarest value signal might be silence itself.
Bloomberg
21-05-2025
- Business
- Bloomberg
SSE Cuts Spending Plan by £3 Billion Amid Slowing Growth
SSE Plc cut its five-year spending plan by £3 billion ($4 billion) as projects slow amid planning delays. The program now totals about £17.5 billion, the UK utility said Wednesday. The company booked a £249.5 million impairment on its investment in renewables projects in southern Europe, reflecting a build-out that's slower than planned because of sector-wide delays to permitting and grid connections.
Irish Times
17-05-2025
- Politics
- Irish Times
Portugal's election seeks to end cycle of instability
Half a century after its transition from dictatorship to democracy, Portugal is in danger of losing the mantle of southern Europe's most stable democracy. Its general election on Sunday will be the third since 2022, as the country has struggled with corruption scandals, a fragmented parliament and weak government. 'We know you are tired of elections and worried about political stability, which we need along with the social, economic and financial stability of the country,' said the conservative acting prime minister, Luís Montenegro, as he campaigned in northern Portugal this week. This marks a dramatic change for a country that had become known for its sober politics. Last year it celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Carnation Revolution, which peacefully removed the four-decades-long dictatorship. Despite several years of turmoil following the transition to democracy, in recent decades Portugal's politics have been marked by their relative stability, as conservatives and social democrats have alternated in power, a characteristic that was particularly notable in the wake of the euro-zone crisis. READ MORE 'The principal existing parties of centre-left and centre-right held up much better in Portugal than in the rest of southern Europe in the wake of the 'Great Recession' that began in 2008 and its austerity-oriented aftermath,' said Robert M Fishman, a professor of political science at Madrid's Carlos III University. Outgoing prime minister Luis Montenegro greets supporters in Sintra, west of Lisbon. Photograph: Patricia De Melo Moreira/Getty This contrasted with Italy's fragmented parliament and Spain's polarisation and territorial tensions. In 2019, Portugal's Socialist then-prime minister, António Costa, looked disdainfully across the border as he appealed to voters. 'What we don't want is a repeat of what is happening in Spain,' he said. 'We've had four years of stability and Spain has had four elections in four years.' However, the tables have now been turned. Spain's Socialist prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, has been in office since 2018 while in 2023 Costa stepped down after being named as a suspect in a corruption investigation, although the inquiry found no evidence of wrongdoing by him. Montenegro won last year's election, but his centre-right Democratic Alliance (AD) coalition formed a fragile minority government which collapsed after he lost a confidence vote in March. That development was triggered by allegations of a conflict of interest on the part of the prime minister. In 2021, when he was outside politics, Montenegro created a company, Spinumviva, whose ownership he transferred to his wife. But, since taking office, the company, and therefore his family, have benefited from contracts awarded by the government. Montenegro's failure to move swiftly to clarify or sever his links to Spinumviva allowed the scandal to snowball. Montenegro said the election will 'end the atmosphere of constant insinuations and intrigue'. 'We have elections due to a personal problem of the prime minister,' said António Costa Pinto, of the University of Lisbon's Institute of Social Sciences, who sees the ballot as an opportunity for Montenegro to 're-legitimise himself' in the wake of the affair. 'The alternative would be to have a parliamentary commission [to investigate] and finish his political career,' he said. Attempts by the Socialist Party candidate, Pedro Nuno Santos, to exploit the case on the campaign trail appear to have failed and he is trailing the conservative in polls. 'The Portuguese are too worried by more immediate problems,' said political commentator António Capinha. 'They want to see solutions to the enormous structural problems in Portuguese society which have not been tackled for years.' The cost of housing is one such issue, with rentals soaring in recent years, pricing many Portuguese out the market. A survey by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) found that, of 30 countries studied, Portugal had seen the worst deterioration in housing access over the last decade. Low pensions and wages are further causes of discontent, triggering recent street protests, while an increase in migrant arrivals has created another challenge, with the far-right Chega's tough stance on the issue heavily influencing public debate. [ Far right 'breaks political culture' of tolerance in Portugal Opens in new window ] But although the result of Sunday's election looks relatively easy to predict, with Montenegro's AD coalition apparently heading for victory, the make-up of the next government is less clear. While many other European conservative parties have accepted working with the far right to remain in power, so far Portugal has not followed suit, with Montenegro ruling out Chega as a partner. However, as the third force in parliament and polling strongly, Chega's potential role as kingmaker is undeniable. Pedro Passos Coelho, a former prime minister and leader of Montenegro's centre-right Social Democrat Party (PSD), has underlined that possibility by highlighting his own ideological affinity with the far-right party. A strong showing by Montenegro on Sunday would not only help him banish the cloud of scandal but could also allay pressure to work with Chega. Another, less controversial, possible partner for the conservatives would be the Liberal Initiative, which has been polling in fourth place. In 2015, the Socialist Party managed to form a government, despite losing the election, with the support of a broad left-wing alliance which came to be known as the Geringonça, or 'contraption'. However, with the overall vote for left-wing parties having dropped, such an outcome looks unlikely this time.
