Millennials have upended the business world. Brands strive to understand, though not always succeed, and have serious problems understanding what they want and seek. This is because companies are applying the wrong parameters. Companies strive to observe and analyze the millennials basis of the dominant realities when members of other generations were young and this is a serious error. What was key to the youth of other decades is not for the youth of this decade.

In the case of some specific sectors, the disagreement is not very deep and understanding of these changes in habits and interests is making are not really able to connect with the consumer and to maintain their market positions. Studying how these brands are failing and why they are doing it helps to understand clearly what not to do and what should be the key points in any strategy that seeks to connect with millennials.

Luxury brands are among those with serious problems connecting to the millennials.

What makes collide each other? On the one hand, the strategies have always used have stopped working relationships with these new consumers. On the other, the millennials buyers are much more skeptical in regards to relate to them and questions what luxury is or not ‘believe themselves less’. Millennials have a different context (are poorly paid and in some markets such as the US, dragging many more debts than those in his youth had previous generations) and their life expectancies are completely different. They are the generation that has grown up with the Internet, smart phones and the sharing economy and for them the world is made up differently.

And therefore, how to connect or not between brands and consumers must be based on a different basis and has to be different. Will they stop spending millennials products? In fact, experts do not believe that’s what will happen. The millennials remain an opportunity for luxury brands, but they will know if they conform to new rules of play. As pointed out in an analysis Phys collecting Deloitte estimates, brands will have to invest much more in connecting with them and have to assume that their loyalty is much more limited. “Their commitment to technology has made are exposed to many sources of information, a wider range of influences and smaller brands” recall from analysis firm.

Brands need to think differently and play with different weapons. They do not have to.

What worked and what it does now?

Luxury brands have to change the chip completely and have to start to understand that things are not as they were. In fact, a recent study indicated that the high end is slowing in sales because consumers are preferring to spend their money on other realities (and spending more on cheap brands and stores, at Primark). Luxury brands had become accustomed to whatever happened always going to have a market ready to consume, rich and affluent who saw them as a sample of what they had achieved and aspired to, but as some analysts are pointing that the market remains there, waiting for them, it becomes somewhat questionable.

Will they inherit youth that trend?

It seems that for them and not what is really luxury begins to be something else entirely. The luxury begins to associate the experience and not the cost of a product. What are the product or consumer reports? That is what is beginning to be valued more than who it is that makes that product, which is completely changing the rules of the game.

Millennials do not buy that luxury does not mean they do not have money to do so. The problem is not necessarily that because, in fact, millennials are able to spend much money as what. The key is how this product fits into your life and how has an existence beyond simply purchase. Consumers invest in these age group dinners, outings, leisure … These are, again, experiences and they are something that is not just a thing you buy, but something that remains with yourself forever. Therefore, some analysts believe that luxury brands should change everything, including their shops, making providers of experiences.

To this we must add that luxury brands have had to change (or are having to change) completely how to play its cards on the market. After decades and centuries playing limited, to exclusive, to the inaccessible, now they need to be more visible than ever and have to enter the massive network world and especially social networks.