Value is not getting lost, it’s getting reassigned. The Mechanics behind that shift are worth noticing.

In my last post, I wrote about value assignment in commodity driven markets, and how familiar those patterns feel across categories people assume are unrelated.

The variance in value is not random. It has inputs (and actually creates insane opportunities in those micro differences)

One of the biggest inputs is social media, and the consumer markets it reflects: it puts brands in direct contact with a community’s aspiration. Status is signaled in real time. Meaning gets reinforced publicly, fast.

So value gets negotiated in ways many brands were never designed to handle.

Legacy luxury grew up in a more top down world. Narrative, access, and symbolism could be set with far more control.

A useful legacy example is Tiffany & Co.

“Not Your Mother’s Tiffany”, one of their recent campaigns, took real heat when it launched.

But the strategic move was larger than the slogan. Under LVMH, Tiffany kept pushing into modern cultural visibility, with Alexandre Arnault central to that posture.

Whether someone loved it or hated it, an important shift was put on display: a legacy brand reshaping its value in public, through culture and product, not just heritage.

Emerging brands come up in that reality from day one. You see it most clearly in beauty, where celebrity associations tied directly to product lines collapse the distance between aspiration and ownership almost instantly.

This is the part I keep coming back to
Especially at the overlap of luxury and tech:

Apple is a gold standard for anchoring value through product discipline, pricing integrity, and ecosystem strength even when markets are fully transparent. You can see it in how its secondary markets behave, and in the structure Apple has built around trade in and certified devices.

It’s a useful model for luxury leaders in a world where the primary market sets the story, and the secondary market tests whether it holds.

Brands can control more than they think, but only if they set structure that aligns brand value with market demand, and own the loop that reinforces it.

That is what the LVMH shift at Tiffany signaled to me.

Proactive structure beats reactive commentary.

Otherwise, you are playing whack a mole as culture defines value and the market prices it.