The New Luxury
From Price Tag to Cultural Capital
Insights Beyond Hospitality is a series of interviews with four bold thinkers outside traditional hospitality to uncover unique insights about what today’s high-net-worth guests value and where luxury experiences will go next. This series is curated and hosted by myself, Susie Arnett, and Sharon Hirschowitz for the International Luxury Hotel Association.
In this interview, we dive deep with Brand Strategist, Ana Andjelic.
An Interview with Ana Andjelic, PhD in Sociology and Brand Strategist
What can luxury hospitality learn from a fashion brand strategist?
Luxury today isn’t just a price point. It’s a point of view. In this wide-ranging conversation, we talk with sociologist and brand strategist
about how luxury has shifted from conspicuous consumption to cultural capital—and what that means for hospitality brands that want to stay ahead.Drawing from her work with global brands and her writing in The Business of Aspiration, Ana offers a blueprint for the next era of luxury—one that rewards taste over trend, experience over access, and human connection over transactional service.
Below are some of the most compelling ideas and questions for hoteliers to reflect on.
From Price Tag to Cultural Capital
“Your guests aren’t consuming, they’re collecting.”
Susie: Something you've written about is how the way that we signal status now has changed from conspicuous consumption to cultural capital. And so we'd love for you to talk about cultural capital, how do you define that? And how can we leverage that in hospitality?
Ana: This is a great question, and I think it has become increasingly relevant. The cultural capital, how I define it is taste, knowledge, membership, belonging. So when you look at taste now, it's been on everyone's mind recently. Brands are framed as tastemakers, and tastemakers online are increasingly valued especially human tastemakers. This creates a distinction between active taste and passive taste. Passive taste is that algorithmic taste. You know, when you open your Instagram feed, and you see all the same images of people posting what they're doing in Kyoto. And the same goes for other creative industries like entertainment or fashion when everyone is increasingly looking the same.
Active taste is a taste that requires effort and that makes it very human in the sense that we have those taste communities, those niches that are very visible in hospitality, in those niche hotels, in publishing, in niche magazines, in members clubs, in invite-only spaces where you have to know where to go, who to ask, when you need to dig deeper, when you need to invest your time and effort to learn something, to develop your taste, to refine it. So “active taste” is one form of cultural capital that we are now seeing.
Questions for Hoteliers:
How is your property cultivating a sense of “in-the-know” belonging for guests?
Do your experiences reward effort and taste, or simply deliver convenience?
Curating for the Collector
Susie: Can you talk a little about this kind of collector's mindset where it is more than just the Instagrammable moment? But there's something deeper and more meaningful.
Ana: You touched upon three things, which is this intersection between taste, curation, and collecting. So when you talk about tastemaking experiences, these are the very curated experiences. And when you say curated experience, then again, you require that knowledge, that information, that belonging to specific groups of people who are going to direct you to specific things.
Like in Wes Anderson movies. The art in his movies is done by a museum curator, and in the latest movie that premiered at Cannes a couple of weeks ago, they had actual real pieces from Renoir, from the Masters and that means that the cinematic world has been knowledgeably and tastefully curated.
The same thing applies to hotels when you have experts from very different areas of human experience who are building that world. And then where collecting comes in is where connoisseurship versus consumption comes in. Connoisseurship is that knowledge and collectors know. They're assembling collections. They're not merely consuming, they're not merely shopping, they're not merely visiting places. They're assembling a collection of experiences, a collection of places, a collection of belonging, a collection of memberships, a collection of people, if you will, at the end of the day of food, of taste, versus consumption, which does not involve any taste, any curation, any knowledge or information.
Questions for Hoteliers:
Are your offerings part of a larger collection your guest is building?
What makes your stay one they’ll want to “collect” again?
Fragmented Audiences, Focused Strategy
“The funnel is broken. Now it’s about taste communities and micro-strategies.”
Sharon: What can the hotel industry learn from the luxury industry overall, how they get to know their customer, and how they gather and interpret that data?
Ana: I think overall that all industries are now dealing with a changed funnel, and what is more, how people become aware of brands. How do they consider them? How do they become interested in them? And then how do they convert? How they either purchase brands or visit a hotel or destination? Then how they stay loyal.
In that old-school funnel, when there was a very defined cultural influence of brands, including hospitality brands, you influence culture through mass advertising. You had very specific print magazines and advertising and newspapers or TV or other forms of mass media. And that is how you built awareness. That sort of mass awareness doesn't really exist anymore. So now what hotels are dealing with along with other brands is really reaching out to to a number of of custom consumer niches, or these taste communities, and needing to create cultural products to reach those taste communities.
Cultural products can be content and editorial. They can be creators and cultural observers, commentators, curators, and critics. It can be brand codes and aesthetics. It can also be specific experiences. It can be events, collaborations, or merchandising. There is an entire portfolio of cultural products available that are held together by a brand story.
So why all of this is important is that it fragments the funnel. And that's where that data becomes important and the media approach becomes important, because once you distribute all those cultural products. Not all of them are going to be successful in all contexts. You really need to be very mindful of which audience you're going after with which purpose and then use media to amplify that. So it's not that linear or mass strategy anymore.
Questions for Hoteliers:
Have you created rich, behavior-based personas for your guest segments?
Does each touchpoint reflect the influences, aspirations, and cultural contexts of the taste cluster you’re targeting?
Invisible is the New Luxury
“The next luxury is the one you don’t even know exists.”
Susie: Along those lines with these cultural products, do you feel like certain types of storytelling are especially effective with the top-of-the-dramid customer, that high net worth customer?
Ana: There we're going back to connoisseurship, taste, curation, membership exclusivity, invite-only white glove service. So in that sense, it's about belonging to a club that not everyone is invited to and that not everyone even knows about. And we're seeing that more and more even in New York, which has always been a very open space where you had billionaires mingling with art school students in clubs. Now you have private clubs like Cipriani, San Vincente, and so on, and even more private than that. There are places you don't even know about. So I think that's where we are going towards even more private, even more secret, even more invisible. Even more curated, even more tasteful.
Questions for Hoteliers:
What parts of your guest experience are delightfully “hidden”?
Are you building moments that reward curiosity and effort?
Brand Blending: Hospitality x Fashion x Wellness
“The category that leads is what guests remember. The hotel is the support system.”
Susie: One of the other things you had written about is this idea of how all these different brands are mixing. You’re seeing this intersection of retail and luxury and hospitality and beauty where Bulgari's got a hotel and Aman has the Aman Essentials line. There’s a real mixing in terms of the connoisseurship and the tastemaking, and I would love to hear you talk a little bit about what you're seeing there, too, and what are some lessons we can learn in hospitality about these kinds of very liquid brand boundaries.
Ana: I think the new thing is, first of all, that the merger of retail and hospitality is going to continue from both ends. I think that luxury fashion brands have made bigger forays, with LVMH opening hotels for example. And Four Seasons selling branded bedding and towels.
We’re also seeing a rise in wellness hotels. It's all about wellness. So you have thousands of square footage of gyms and spas and yoga rooms and hot pools and cold plunges and massages and all sorts of IV treatments. And you have a value proposition, which is biohacking or wellness, and then you have a hotel attached to it. Or for some hotels, the value proposition can be food, and then you have a hotel attached to it. So you need to have one category that leads and if you’re a hotel, it may not be the hotel.
Questions for Hoteliers:
What emotional category leads your property? Wellness? Culture? Design? Food?
How can that anchor the rest of your guest experience?
Hyper-Personalization Starts with Insight
“Hyper-personalization isn’t a tactic. It’s the outcome of good strategy.”
Sharon: Can you expand a little on ultra-personalization and how hotels can look into their customer data to tailor every transaction and make clients feel valued?
Ana: There is so much data on customers. And the problem is, that there is a lack of customer insight because all this data is sitting in different parts of the organization. The majority of my experience is with luxury fashion and there you have a situation where the product team has some data, design has some data, merchandising has some data, the creative department has the data, marketing has some data, customer experience management has data, but no one is talking to each other. No one is creating this holistic customer view, and it has become very fashionable to talk about this holistic customer view customer-centric organization. But very few places are really doing that.
So the way I solved that problem in the past, with Banana Republic and Esprit where I was Chief Brand Officer, was to create personas that speak to all those different departments, and then take into account all the different data. We have no more than 3 to 4 personas that address not just demographic, but also psychographics, but not just even psychographics, but also media influences, and cultural influences, the brand temperature, their likelihood to recommend the brand. And all the way to what are the key barriers right now to purchase?
What did those people pay attention to? What are they influenced by? Not just for a customer, but also for their funnel, and what information they're looking for. Are they going to share? And who else are they going to influence, and who are they influenced by?
You create this entire customer ecosystem. Once you have that, then hyper-personalization is easy because you do have a database that is already segmented by past purchases, past behavior, past open rates, visits, and preferences. And you then, tailor not only the stay for them, but you tailor the entire 365-day communication with those people. But you see, first, you need to really have those personas, and then you can go to hyper-personalization because I feel very often hyper-personalization becomes a tactic instead of a strategy.
Questions for Hoteliers:
Are your teams aligned around shared personas and insights?
How detailed is your list segmentation?
Becoming Your Guest’s Life Concierge
“Curate their life, not just their vacation.”
Susie: One of the things we talk a lot about in the hotel business is what happens to the guest after the stay. So a lot of these cultural products that you're talking about are ways to raise awareness, discovery, build the brand, build loyalty, get guests to return. But what are your thoughts about after the stay? How do we layer some of these ideas into maintaining relationships after our guest checks out?
Ana: Well, if you mix everything we talked about here, these are all the cultural products that are at your disposal, and we use them to build awareness about the hotel. Or the hospitality group, and we use them to enrich those people's stays. Then the same principle applies after the stay.
How do you stay involved? Knowing what you know about them, knowing what they like, how do you become that concierge of their life? How do you become tastemakers in their life? How do you curate their life knowing what they like? Because at the end of the day, you want them to come back. If I was at a hotel in Pantelleria and I really enjoyed the food, I may want to make it at home. How are you going to help me do that?
Questions for Hoteliers:
Can your brand become a “tastemaker” in your guests’ lives year-round?
What small, sensory, or story-driven moments can you send home with them?
The Brand Starts with Your Staff
“Your staff is your brand. Train them in belief, not just service steps.”
Sharon: Empowering your staff is key.
Ana: Your staff is your brand. That is how everyone experiences your hotel brand, not just your beautiful surroundings and the fantastic sheets and the food. It's the staff that makes you feel comfortable because that's the human level, and the more the staff believes and understands the brand the more they can deliver. and the more people are going to feel it on that human emotional visceral level. And I just think this is such a simple answer, but like, look around, you know when was the last time you felt that?
Susie: This training piece is such an important thing that you're talking about. Every touch point, every person is going to inform that experience.
Ana: There are things you can control, and there are things that you cannot control. But at least I guess it's kind of going across and managing what you cannot control.
Susie Arnett: That’s right, it’s the kind of human consideration that you would say to a member of your family, that is what hospitality is at its core. Right? We're hosting people, and they should feel like family, and they should feel welcomed.
Sharon: We're almost going full circle to where we started.
Ana: If I were the CMO, I would look at that first. I would look at the brand and make sure that everyone understands the brand and that brand identity is strong and differentiated. And then we'll put effort into making sure how that brand identity is expressed is right in a variety of ways, with a portfolio of cultural products and the narrative comes after that. Then, staff need to feel it, and they need to feel it as their own.
Questions for Hoteliers:
Are you training your team to understand and live your brand identity?
Do they feel empowered to extend hospitality from the heart?
The Future is Human
“We talk about AI but what guests crave is human attention.”
Susie: Black Tomato just sent out an email about a trip to Iceland curated by an artist, so you get to see the country through her eyes. It's bringing those other voices in. That's the connoisseurship you're talking, that tastemaking. I don't have to be the tastemaker by myself as a hotel brand. If I can partner with the right people, then they can help me design these experiences or this content, or this story, or whatever you know, which helps extend the brand in interesting ways.
Ana: Oh, absolutely. And I think that's just scratching the surface. So there are curators who have those stories. There’s an app that gives you London through the eyes of a Marathon runner. So it's again going back to the human experience because no two people see the world the same way. And this is better than AI to see the world through someone else's eyes, especially if someone has a strong story to filter through.
That is just the beginning. I think hotels can absolutely embrace that. It's not just like, oh, there is a curator with this tour. No, it's bringing in the human stories and seeing the world through as many perspectives and curated views as possible, that is that active taste. That's how we develop. That's how we become connoisseurs.
Questions for Hoteliers:
Are you designing hospitality that feels like family, not just service?
How can you invite your guests—and your staff—to fall in love with your brand?
Interview edited and condensed for clarity.
Tune in to Suite Talk, the Luxury Insights podcast from ILHA to hear the entire conversation: LINK HERE
ANA ANDJELIC BIOGRAPHY
Ana Andjelic is a global brand executive, author of “Hitmakers: How Brands Influence Culture,” and “The Business of Aspiration” and has been recognized three times by Forbes for her CMO work. Ana specializes in building brand-driven modern businesses. She earned her doctorate in sociology and is a widely read columnist, speaker, and advisor. Subscribe to her newsletter, The Sociology of Business.