Ask Luxury Brand Management students from the ESSEC MSc Marketing Management and Digital (MMD) what defines a luxury brand, and they are quick to answer that the secret lies in a brand’s DNA and the codes it chooses to use.

This is, they say, one of the critical lessons that Sonja Prokopec, LVMH Chaired Professor, reinforces in the classroom. But while it is one thing to recite a definition, it is arguably a whole other to be able to put that knowledge into practice when developing marketing strategies—especially for a brand as established as Tiffany & Co.

Yet, this is precisely what the 2022 cohort did in the first-ever collaboration between ESSEC and Tiffany & Co. Nine teams rose to the challenge of developing marketing strategies for the brand. Three of these were selected to present their ideas at Singapore’s Tiffany & Co. headquarters.

Rigor and Creativity for Strategies to Retain Their Lustre

The stakes were high, but students delivered. “You can see that they are very structured and outstanding marketers,” Benedicte Mackiewicz, Senior Director of Marketing for Asia-Pacific at Tiffany & Co, affirms.

Having met with the students at the project’s start, middle, and end, Mackiewicz adds that she was most impressed by their rigor and meticulousness.

For example, the team declared top—called Tiffany & Us—blew the judges away with their comprehensive research, which included a survey with over 900 respondents to tackle the Australian and New Zealand markets.

The first runners-up, team Moments with Tiffany’s, won the judges with their creative proposal, which boldly focused on the underrepresented cohorts and overlooked communities in Australia and New Zealand to “present the brand in a progressive and uninhibited manner.”

True to the lessons learned in their Luxury Brand Management module, all three teams at headquarters had one factor in common: Consistency with the Tiffany & Co. DNA.

For Yuqiao Gu and her teammates from team Five Guys, this meant ensuring their research and eventual ideas for the SEA market would be coherent with the existing brand message and marketing.

Doing this added credibility to their proposal, centered around how people of different ages and at various phases of love interact with Tiffany & Co., earning the team its well-deserved position as second runners-up.

Insights Gained and Memories Made? Priceless.

“It was interesting for me to see the pulse of an audience that I have a hard time capturing,” Mackiewicz shares, adding that the proposals from students offered her valuable insights about the perspectives of the younger generation—a market that the brand hopes to engage within the next five to 10 years.

If and how any of the ideas presented take root may take years to be seen, but for the participating students, being able to put their classroom training into practice and be heard by senior executives from the world of Tiffany & Co. has been rewarding enough.

“Who would have thought that ESSEC students would be able to present in front of such high-level executives and share their insights,” Alexia Maurin exclaims. “It taught me that nothing is too big or that you can’t do ‘just because you’re a student’!”

Heartiest congratulations to all three teams who made it to the finals for their exceptional work!

• Overall winner: Tiffany & Us
  Alexia Maurin, Lorenzo Valenti, Clemence Lin, Juan Diego Ocampo Rodriguez, Tsu An Chen and Valeria Valle
• First runners-up: Moments with Tiffany’s
  Audrey Channitanda, Alessia Corte, Ludovica Fortunata Cutrona, Macy Ann Susan Gacutan, Jiahao Jiang, and Marcus McDowell
• Second runners-up: Five Guys
  Yuqiao Gu, Shaowei Yuan, Chen Xinyue, Yiting Ke and Yiyi Hang