Coach And Democratized Luxury

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Some of you know that I have been reading Lou Frankfurt's book Bagman about his years building coach, and it has me thinking about a story I had in my head for most of my life, and got completely wrong. For a long time I had a story in my head about Coach. I thought Coach was the brand that wanted to be Louis Vuitton and could not pull it off. I thought it was the almost luxury bag, the one that tried to sit at the elite table and got seated near the kitchen. I thought Coach was, in a quiet way, losing. And reading Bagman, I realized I had it completely backward. Coach was not failing to become Louis Vuitton. Coach looked hard at the game Louis Vuitton was playing, the game of European heritage and $4,000 bags and stores you needed a certain kind of confidence to even walk into. And Coach decided, on purpose, with clear eyes, that it was never going to win that game. So it refused to play it. And it built a different game. One it could win, and then it won it so completely that we now use its own words to describe the whole category it created. Frankfurt has a phrase for the category they built. He called it democratized luxury. Where the European houses were pricey, coach was affordable. Where they were snooty and elitist, coach was friendly and accepting. Where they were exclusive, coach was inviting. He put it like this if a Louis Vuitton bag told the world that a woman had arrived, a coach bag was for the woman who wanted the world to know she was working her way up, and succeeding on the way. When you think about that last line, I think it actually describes the audiences that most of us serve too. Students who are working their way up, succeeding on the way, climbing. So here is the question I want to live inside for this episode. What if your institution actually doesn't have to lose the prestige game? What if, like the version of coach that was in my head for so long, you have simply been trying to win the wrong one? And what would it actually take to pursue prestige in a way that works instead of a way that just looks expensive and fools no one? That is what we are going to talk about today.

Why Prestige Matters In Education

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This is not an episode telling you that prestige is bad or that wanting it is somehow beneath you. The desire for prestige is not vanity. For a tuition-dependent institution, prestige influences enrollment. Prestige can lead to new efforts that generate net tuition revenue. It can be the path to the gift that closes the campaign. It can be survival. When your board or leadership pushes toward it, they are not being shallow. They are reaching for security. I take that completely seriously. So this is not a lecture about resisting prestige. It is a teaching about how prestige actually works, because most institutions are going about it in a way the evidence says will

Prestige Is A Verdict

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fail. Here is the single idea I want you to carry out of this episode. Prestige is a verdict, not a claim. Let me say that again. A verdict, not a claim. It's something the market decides about you. It's not something you announce about yourself. And the entire difference between the institutions that move up the prestige ladder and the institutions that embarrass themselves trying is whether they understood that one distinction. When you try to claim prestige you have not earned, the market has a word for what it sees. Your branding consultants likely aren't going to use this word, but I am because it is exactly right. What they see is cosplay, prestige cosplay. You put on the costume of the thing without being the thing. The costume is convincing for about a minute, and then people look closer and the spell breaks, and you're worse off than when you started, because now they have caught you reaching. Let me show you what that looks like out in the world, and then I'll show you another path, the one that actually works. In 2011,

Prestige Cosplay In The Wild

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a man named Ron Johnson took over JC Penny. He was the executive who had just built the Apple store, arguably the single most successful retail concept of the era. He came into a tired middle-of-the-mall department store and he decided to make it elegant. Clean, modern boutiques inside the store, sophisticated design. And most famously he got rid of the constant coupons and the endless sales and replaced them with what he called fair and square pricing. One honest price, very dignified, very apple. There was just one problem. He upgraded the language and the look of the store before he had given his actual customers any reason to believe. JCPenney shoppers did not come for elegance. They came for the thrill of the coupon, the sense that they had won a little something. Johnson took away the game they loved and offered them sophistication they had not asked for and did not trust. The numbers that JCPenney faced as a result are still some of the most painful in modern retail. In a single year, JCPenney's sales fell about 25%. That is roughly $4 billion in revenue, gone. In one quarter, sales were down more than 28%. Ron Johnson was out in about 17 months. Rajiv Lal, a professor at Harvard Business School who studied the collapse, put it plainly. The company lost its identity. It put on a costume, and in doing so it stopped being recognizable as itself, without ever becoming the new thing either. If JCPenney is too far from your world, let me give you a fresher one, Jaguar. In 2024, Jaguar decided to reinvent itself as an ultra-luxury electric brand. They dropped the iconic Leaping Cat, the logo that had defined the brand for decades, and replaced it with a minimalist word mark. And then they launched a campaign to announce the new Jaguar to the world. The campaign had no car in it, not one. Instead, it featured models in avant-garde fashion, bright pinks and bold colors, walking what looked like a runway. The tagline was copy nothing. It read more like a high fashion house trying to be provocative than a car company trying to sell you a vehicle. People who saw it online genuinely could not tell what was being advertised. Some thought it was a parody. Jaguar said it was trying to attract a completely new kind of customer and leave its old audience behind. And in a way it succeeded at exactly that. In April of 2025, in all of Europe, Jaguar registered 49 cars. 49. The year before that number was nearly 2,000, a drop of about 97%. Now Jaguar will tell you fairly that they had stopped selling their old models on purpose during the transition. But watch what their own data showed in the meantime, because this is the part that should haunt every leader chasing a rankings bump. Their brand awareness actually went up. Website traffic more than doubled. The number of people who said they would be willing to pay a premium went up by 20%. Everything that looks like prestige went up. And they sold 49 cars. That is the whole lesson in one company. Awareness is not prestige. Looking elevated is not the same as being chosen. You can win the costume contest and still have an empty showroom.

Why Brand Stretch Backfires

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Marketing scholars have known the underlying mechanism for this for 35 years. Back in 1990, David Acre and Kevin Keller published the foundational research on what happens when a brand stretches into new territory. And then in 1991, a team led by C.W. Park sharpened it into the finding that matters most for you. They studied whether brands could extend into fancier, more prestigious categories. And what they found was that a brand can stretch surprisingly far, even into things that look nothing like its original product, but only when the move stays consistent with what the brand already deeply means. The concept has to carry through. When the concept does not carry, the extension does not just fail. It reaches back and damages the original brand. There is a small, almost comical example from this literature that I love. In the early 1980s, Colgate, the toothpaste company, launched a line of frozen dinners, Colgate Kitchen Entrees, the brand that means clean, minty mouth, asking you to eat its lasagna. Consumers could not make the two ideas live in the same head. It failed, and it is now taught in business schools as a warning. The market could not make sense of the move. That is cosplay. Same brand, new costume, no reason to believe.

The Order That Builds Prestige

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So how do you do the opposite? How do you actually earn the reason to believe? It turns out prestige, real prestige, gets built in a specific order, and almost everyone gets the order wrong. So let me walk you through it the right way, with people who did it. The first move is the one institutions skip the most. You start from something you already genuinely own, not something you aspire to, something real today. Think about Dyson. James Dyson did not decide to be a premium brand and then go looking for a reason. He spent years and more than 5,000 prototypes solving one real problem that every other vacuum ignored, which was that vacuums lose suction as the bag fills. He built something that was actually demonstrably better. And then, and this is the part I love, he made the bin transparent, so you could see the proof of it filling up with what your old vacuum had been leaving in your carpet. The premium price came after the real thing existed. The prestige grew out of substance you could see with your own eyes. So the first question isn't how do we look more prestigious? The first question is what do we already do that is genuinely excellent, that we have been too modest or too scattered to make visible. Prestige has to grow out of something true. If it does not, you are back in the costume. The second move is to choose the kind of prestige you are actually going to pursue, because there is more than one kind and you cannot have all of them. There is exclusive, untouchable, top-of-the-mountain prestige. And there is something the researchers call mass stege, mass prestige, which is premium but attainable. Back in 2003, in a Harvard Business Review piece called Luxury for the Masses, Michael Silverstein and Neil Fisk showed that ordinary middle market consumers will happily pay premiums of 20%, 50%, sometimes 200%, for things that feel genuinely better. Not Louis Vuitton money, but real money, for real elevation they can actually reach. And this is exactly the wrong coach chose. Lou Frankfurt did not try to out airmes airmes. He found the empty space between the $4,000 European bag and the no name bag at the department store, and he built there, on purpose. The quality of luxury, the utility, and the price of the mass market in one product. He picked his kind of prestige. He did not let the board or his own ego talk him into a kind he could never win. Choosing not to chase the elite institution's kind of prestige is not surrender. It is the single most important part of strategy. Choosing what you are going to do and what you are not going to do, because it frees every dollar and every ounce of energy you are about to waste pretending. The third move is the one JCPenney got backward. You have to upgrade the actual thing before you upgrade the language about the thing. Look at how Lexus entered the world in 1989. Toyota did not slap a higher price on a Camry and call it luxury. It built a genuinely superior car, and then it proved the superiority in a way you could not argue with. There was a famous ad where they balanced champagne glasses in a pyramid on the hood of the running engine, and the glasses did not even tremble. And then they backed it with a service experience modeled on the finest hotels. When Lexus had an early recall, dealers personally came and picked up the cars, fixed them, and returned them washed with a full tank of gas. The luxury was real before the word luxury was ever spoken. Within two years, they were the top-selling luxury import in America. There is research underneath this too. A high price does raise how good people assume you are. But, and this is the crucial finding for anyone tempted by cosplay, that effect is weakest with the people who actually know your category. You can fool a stranger with a price tag. You cannot fool an expert or a parent on their fifth campus tour, or a faculty member who knows exactly what their peers experience at other colleges or universities. The offer has to be real because your most important audiences can tell. And the fourth move is to control your signals and let other people carry them for you. The research here from a 2010 study by Hahn, Nunez, and Dries shows that status signals can be loud or quiet, and that the most secure prestige is often the quietest. The brand sure of themselves whisper, the ones reaching shout. Think about how Yeti built belief in a $300 cooler when the shelf was full of $30 ones. They did not take out billboards screaming that they were premium. They put their coolers in the hands of hunting and fishing guides, the people whose gear has to survive being thrown off a truck in the backcountry. They let the most credible users in the category vouch for them. The prestige was carried by validators, by people the audience already trusted, not by Yeti talking about itself. That is what earning a verdict looks like. You build the real thing, you put it in front of the right witnesses, and you let them say it, so you do not

When The Ladder Is Not Yours

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have to. Now I want to be honest with you, because not everyone listening is in the same situation, and I will not pretend you are. Some of you have a real credible strength, and the right move is to climb the ladder I just described and earn your way up. But some of you are standing at a ladder that is not your ladder, and no amount of climbing changes that verdict. And if that is you, the answer is not to climb harder. The answer is the one coach found. Stop competing in a category you cannot win, and you go to find one you can. This is its own enormous subject, and I am going to give it its own episode, because it deserves real time. There is a whole body of strategy work about this, from blue ocean strategy to the idea of category design, and the finding that gets my attention is this. When a company creates a brand new category instead of fighting for share in an existing one, the company that defines the category tends to capture the lion's share of all the value created in it. Whoever names the territory usually gets to claim the largest share of it. You have seen this in action before. It declared the end of software altogether and created the cloud category, and then it owned it. If the prestige ladder we walked through feels like it is leaning against the wrong wall for your institution, that is critical for you to recognize. And I hope you will join me again when I walk through category creation in a future episode.

The One Question Before You Spend

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But for today, let me bring this home to the decision that is probably sitting on your desk right now. The proposal to add the doctoral program, the push to rename the college a university, the campaign someone wants to hang on the word prestige, the athletics move, the ranking strategy. Before you spend a dollar on any of it, I want you to run it through one question, and it is just the idea we started with. Are we trying to earn a verdict or are we simply trying to claim one? If the move is backed by something real, a genuine strength you are finally making visible, an offer that is actually better, witnesses who will vouch for you, then you are climbing the ladder, and you should climb it with confidence. But if the move is mostly new language, mostly a nicer logo, mostly the costume of an institution you wish you were, then you are doing prestige cosplay, and the market will catch you. The way it caught JCPenney, the way it caught Jaguar with its 49 cars and its soaring, meaningless awareness. Lou Frankfurt could have spent his career trying to out Europe the European houses and lost. Instead, he saw with absolute clarity which game coach could win and which game it could not. And he had the discipline to build in the space that was actually his. So here is what I want to leave you with. When you look at the prestige your board is asking you to chase, ask yourself this honestly. Is this a verdict we can earn? Or is it a costume we are hoping no one inspects too closely? And if it is a game you know in your gut you cannot win, are you brave enough to do what Coach did and go build the one you can? Prestige is a verdict, not a claim. The institutions that thrive in the next decade will be the ones that stopped announcing what they wished they were and started earning what they actually are. Thank you for joining me today to look beyond the Ivory Tower. Talk to you soon.