Six Powerful Branding Lessons from Prada, Gucci, and Versace

What Silicon Valley can learn from Italy’s greatest fashion houses

The key to real growth marketing

You may not give a lick about fashion. That’s okay. (I’m writing this article wearing a decidedly unfashionable pair of swim trunks). This article isn’t really about clothing.

Instead, it’s about why tech companies need to use their imaginations when it comes to branding, and the importance of understanding their audience, establishing a brand personality and humanizing their brands.

Indeed, the key to real growth marketing is not “hacking” but comes from having a deep understanding of other industries and even other cultures.

In today’s technology industry, where the old barriers to entry are almost non-existent, where technical motes are evaporating fast, and where patents are all but written on toilet paper, branding will play an increasingly important role for emerging technology companies.

To illustrate the potential of branding to transform a business, let’s take a look at one of the most competitive and commodified industries — fashion. Specifically, let’s look at how a handful of Italian fashion designers transformed the global apparel market.

(Ironically, the tech industry is notorious as the province of nerds wearing shorts and hoodies; these nerds might not think they can learn a thing or two about branding from the makers of $30,000+ purses. But let’s give it a shot.)

Lesson 1: The devil wears Prada (what is a brand?)

Contrary to popular belief, branding has little to do with corporate logos, tag lines, or websites.

Instead, a brand is commonly agreed to be “nothing more than an assortment of memories in the customers’ mind.” What does that mean?

Well, just dig a little deeper into Prada as a case study. Prada was initially founded in 1913 by Mario Prada and his brother Martino as a leather goods shop in Milan. In the 1970s, Miuccia Prada, the granddaughter of the founder and a card-carrying communist Ph.D. graduate, took over the family business. In short order, she and her husband, Patrizio Bertelli, updated and reinvented the company and the brand.

Today Prada is worth an estimated $13 billion.

From a branding perspective, what is most remarkable about Prada is that “unlike other luxury brands, Prada is not built around dominant signifiers, like Louis Vuitton’s monogram bags or Hermès’ scarves and leather goods.”

Instead, Prada’s success is built on something far less tangible, the space the brand occupies in the mind of customers.

Thanks in part to the movie, Prada has become synonymous with rich and powerful women. While owning a Prada bag does not make a woman either of those things, it makes her feel like she’s both.

This emotion is the real power of branding — to make consumers believe they have attributes they don’t necessarily possess.

Lesson 2: Don’t be boring (personality-driven branding)

Comparing the tech branding to fashion branding is, as I like to say, “comparing apples to elephants.” Counter-intuitive as it seems, it makes perfect sense. By comparing dissimilar industries, you can discover and question the assumptions in your thinking that may be undermining growth.

Most tech brands assume that their growth will come from their superior technology. Indeed business-to-business (B2B) tends to be overly focused on benefits and ROI. Unfortunately, the formulas for communicating those values have become so over-used, they convey nothing except, possibly, how dull they are.

Fashion and luxury brands are, on the other hand, overwhelmingly personality-driven. More often than not, they are named for and derive their brand personality from the founding designer. The central idea of personality-driven branding, according to The European Business Review, “is to enliven a brand internally in the minds of brand managers and company employees.”

When it comes to enlivening brands, “Italians do it better.” With more than a dozen designers regularly counted among the top designers of all time, the Italian fashion industry is worth more than $96 billion annually.

Instead of imitating the latest unicorns for their brand strategy, tech brands would do well to spend their next Sprint figuring out how to inject more personality into their brands.

Lesson 3: The original Latin lovers (understanding your audience)

It’s no wonder the myth of the Latin lover originated in Italy. For centuries Italians, the original Latins, have venerated beautiful women.

In the period following WWII, a new breed of modern women emerged. Inspired by Hollywood and the likes of Audrey Hepburn and Jacqueline Kennedy (as well as the emerging feminist writers), they were no longer content to stay at home wearing aprons and house dresses. They wanted a new look — they wanted glamour.

At the same time, French designers like Dior continued to focus on high fashion. Italian fashion designers had a different idea.

According to Fast Company, “only Italian fashion designers truly understood the need for women to have comfortable, versatile clothing that was also tailored and refined.”

Thus, by truly understanding their core audience, Italy’s top fashion designers successfully built brands that have dominated the multi-billion dollar apparel industry for more than 70 years.

Lesson 4: Made in Italy (differentiation)

“How are you different?” That’s one of the first questions that investors invariably ask entrepreneurs looking for money. An entrepreneur needs to be able to answer that question. In excruciating detail, if necessary

Italian designers can differentiate themselves with one word: craftsmanship. For centuries Italy has been known for craftsmanship. To this day, for most consumers, the Made in Italy label means superior quality.

Indeed, startups looking to differentiate themselves would do well to focus on building brands around their core value proposition. It doesn’t matter if that core value is quality, innovation, speed, price, or service; there is no more protective mote for your business than a powerful brand that conveys value in any of these ways.

As HBR put it, “When a corporate identity is coherent, each of the other elements will inform and echo the brand core, resonating with the company’s values and what the brand stands for.”

For decades, brands like Gucci, Valentino, and Moschino have commanded top-dollar prices, and each brand has its unique grip on the market. Whereas Gucci is practically synonymous with luxury, Valentino means classic elegance, and Moschino is bold and daring. Indeed, each enduring brand has carefully cultivated its own brand promise.

For startups, however, there is often an over-reliance on the short-term benefit of being first-to-market with incremental technology advances. Instead, the focus should be on more durable competitive advantages.

Lesson 5: From rags to riches (your founder’s story)

Everybody loves a good to rags to riches story; the fashion industry is no exception. And in that industry, there no better rags to riches story than that of Gianni Versace, whose life, unfortunately, ended tragically. He was the son of a mechanic father and seamstress mother, born in Reggio Calabria in southern Italy. According to People, “Versace grew up surrounded by sewing machines and fabrics in his mother’s studio. He made his first dress at 9 years old and presented his first eponymous collection in 1978 in Milan at age 32.”

In truth, Versace is the exception in Italy’s fashion industry. Many of Italy’s top brands, including Gucci, Prada, and Bulgari, were built with family wealth from textile and leather goods businesses.

Nonetheless, top brands seldom have prosaic stories to tell. It’s as if their flair for drama and style go hand-in-hand with their creativity. And if they don’t have a great story, they create one.

The tech industry has its share of inspiring founder stories. Unfortunately, many young companies and venture capitalists seem to place a higher value on perfecting their elevator pitch than on weaving a compelling narrative.

As Simon Sinek wrote in Start With Why, “Most companies struggle to differentiate or communicate their true value to the outside world. When we, as human beings, struggle to put emotions into words, we rely on metaphors, imagery, and analogies in an attempt to communicate how we feel. We use symbols. We create tangible things for those who believe in what we believe to say. If done properly, that’s what marketing products and services are; a way for organizations to communicate to the world outside.”

So whatever your story is, try not to resort to meaningless jargon. Instead, create tangible symbols — be they metaphors, images, or analogies — that you customers can believe in.

Lesson 6: “L’amore” (love) is all you need (humanizing tech branding)

In reality, sometimes, your brand is about the only thing standing between you and the next company.

Seen from that perspective, would you instead do business with a company that promises significant time savings and higher productivity or the company that makes you feel good about your business, your sense of self, and your job?

Hint: Unless you’re a robot, you’ll pick the one with a personality, the one that understands you, reflects your sense of self, and promises to help you become the person you want to be.

So why do tech marketers keep returning to the same tired ideas of productivity and proving ROI? We all know, saving time doesn’t necessarily increase productivity at all. It’s a speculative claim.

Instead of competing for razor-thin technical superiority, SaaS companies need to go whole-hog to demonstrate their humanness. For instance, during the pandemic, just lay off the automated emails. People will remember how you treated them.

At the risk of trafficking in cultural stereotyping, I’m going to say that Italians generally have a better understanding of what it means “to be human” than most other cultures. To this day, modern Italian culture has deep roots in peasant common-sense wisdom that rivals that of any expert, consultant, or guru.

Take a step back from your marketing and GTM strategy to reflect on the culture that has intuitively understood people and the enduring power of art, beauty, and l’amore (love) for centuries.

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Sean Smith is a proud Italian-American and the Founder and Chief Iconoclast of Virtù b2b (V2b).