Why luxury’s next customer doesn’t look like its last

September 25, 2026

For luxury brands, the goal isn't necessarily to reach more people – it's to identify more of the right people. Image credit: Shutterstock

By Luxury Marketer Intelligence

Luxury has always been shaped by a nuanced understanding of consumers – what they value, what they aspire to, and what makes a brand worthy of their attention and investment.

Now, those signals are becoming even more complex as consumers define luxury on their own terms and high-value customers emerge across a wider range of behaviors, interests and lifestyles.

“For luxury brands, the goal isn't necessarily to reach more people – it's to identify more of the right people,” said Stefanie Abboud, senior director of business strategy and commercialization at AI-driven advertising platform Cognitiv, New York. “That's an important distinction because audience expansion and mass marketing aren't the same thing.”

In an interview with Mack McKelvey, founder/CEO of marketing strategy firm SalientMG, Ms. Abboud explores how deep learning can help luxury marketers build on what they already know about their customers, uncover new sources of demand, and identify opportunities that may not be visible through traditional audience signals alone.

As consumer expectations and behaviors continue to evolve, how is the definition of a luxury consumer expanding?
The definition of a luxury consumer is becoming much less demographic and much more behavioral.

Historically, luxury audiences were often built around relatively predictable proxies: income, net worth, household income, geography, age. Those are still useful signals, but they don’t fully explain how people engage with luxury today.

Consumers are increasingly selective about where they choose to spend. Some may be extremely value conscious across most categories and then spend disproportionately on travel, fashion, wellness, dining or a particular brand they care deeply about.

Conversely, high-household income doesn’t necessarily translate into luxury purchase intent. That means the more interesting question for marketers isn’t simply, “Who can afford our product?” It’s “Who is likely to value what our brand offers?” That creates a much larger and more nuanced definition of the luxury consumer.

Luxury marketers have a deep understanding of their core customers. Where are you seeing opportunities to build on that knowledge and discover new high-value audiences?
Luxury brands often have incredibly rich knowledge of their existing customers, and that's a major advantage.

The opportunity is to use that knowledge as a starting point rather than a boundary.

Your highest-value customers may share behaviors, interests, content consumption patterns or even purchase signals with people who don't fit the typical demographic profile you've historically associated with the brand.

That’s part of the thinking behind Cognitiv’s AudienceGPT: rather than requiring marketers to define every characteristic of an audience, deep learning can evaluate a much broader universe of signals and identify the combinations that are actually predictive of an outcome.

Instead of asking technology to find more people who look exactly like today's customers, you can ask it to identify people who behave like someone who could become tomorrow's customer.

Growth and exclusivity have always existed in tension for luxury brands. How can marketers introduce a brand to new audiences while preserving the sense of distinction that makes luxury compelling?
Growth doesn't have to mean ubiquity.

For luxury brands, the goal isn't necessarily to reach more people – it's to identify more of the right people. That's an important distinction because audience expansion and mass marketing aren't the same thing.

Luxury brands should expand selectively, reaching consumers based on genuine affinity and intent rather than simply increasing the size of the audience.

Technology can help brands discover pockets of consumers with a high affinity for the brand without dramatically broadening their positioning or changing what makes the brand desirable in the first place.

In many ways, better audience intelligence can actually help protect exclusivity. If you're more precise about who you introduce the brand to, you don't need to rely on broad reach to generate growth.

Luxury spending can be highly personal and selective. A consumer might invest $5,000 in a handbag while remaining price-conscious in other areas of her life. What can marketers learn from those nuances that traditional demographic segmentation might not capture?
This is exactly why demographics can be misleading.

Affluence tells you what someone can spend. Behavior tells you what they're willing to spend on.

Luxury is often about prioritization.

A consumer might fly economy but stay at a five-star hotel. They might comparison-shop for groceries but collect designer handbags. They might drive the same car for 10 years but spend significantly on restaurants and travel. Those aren't contradictions. They're signals about what the individual values.

Traditional segments tend to flatten those nuances into categories.

Brands can now understand consumers at the intersection of thousands of behaviors and signals rather than assuming that one characteristic – income, age, geography – determines their propensity to engage with luxury.

Where does deep learning add a new dimension to the audience intelligence and discovery tools luxury marketers already use?
Most audience tools are very good at helping marketers find what they already know to look for. Deep learning adds another dimension because it can identify relationships across a broader more complex set of signals than a human marketer could reasonably define in advance.

Instead of saying "My customer is affluent, 35-54, and interested in travel," you can start with an outcome – these are my customers, these are my converters, these are people demonstrating high intent – and allow the model to determine which combinations of signals actually matter.

For luxury marketers, in particular, that's powerful because the path to purchase is rarely one-dimensional.

Deep learning can uncover combinations of behaviors and affinities that might not seem meaningful independently but can be highly predictive together.

Cognitiv has talked about the idea of “letting your customers surprise you.” What kinds of unexpected insights or opportunities can emerge when luxury marketers take that approach?
Marketers are naturally influenced by what they already know about their customers. But those insights can easily become assumptions: "This is who buys from us; therefore, this is who we should target."

An idea we talk about at Cognitiv is "Letting your customers surprise you" and creating room for discovery.

When you allow models to learn from actual customer behavior rather than only marketer-defined audience criteria, you can uncover affinities or behaviors you wouldn't have thought to test previously.

Sometimes those insights reinforce your assumptions, the more interesting moments are when they don't.

Those surprises can lead to entirely new audience segments, creative strategies, partnerships or even broader business insights.

The model isn't replacing the marketer's understanding of the brand. It's the engine behind expanding the marketer's field of view.

Looking toward 2030, as the luxury customer continues to evolve, what can brands do today to make their audience strategies more adaptive and better positioned for future growth?
The biggest thing brands can do is leverage advertising intelligence to build audience strategies that are designed to learn rather than simply repeat.

Consumer identities and preferences are becoming more fluid, and the signals marketers rely on today won't necessarily be the signals that matter five years from now. That’s why we believe audience intelligence has to be adaptive.

A model shouldn’t just identify what worked once. It should continue learning as consumer behaviors and signals change.

The strongest strategies will combine what a brand knows – its customer data, brand and institutional knowledge – with systems that can continuously identify new patterns as behaviors change.

Luxury brands should absolutely know who their customer is, but they should also leave enough room to discover who their next customer could be.

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