Why luxury branding is not for everyone

Every two weeks or so,  I will get a phone call or an email from a prospective client wanting to create  "luxury branding" for their product or service. They want to enter the market with a new product catering to a discerning few. Nowadays, it seems every Joe, Dick and Mary (have to add Mary for PC purposes) wants to start a luxury brand. But just because you say it is, does not make it so.
Once the conversation begins, the client will ultimately say "I want something that "pops."  How about red?" That's where I stop and question if I am the right fit for them.

Luxury services and products are NOT intended for everyone. It is never about selling to the MOST people, it is selling the most to a FEW people (who can afford it.) Once you understand that (and accept it) then you can begin the design process on the right footing. "Know thy self" said Plato in his conversations with Socrates.

In communication design I believe the following to be true:

Simple design is sophisticated design and therefore exclusive design.

It is not a coincidence that the brands that represent true luxury and excellence, and thus true sophistication, are for the most part using simple marks, beautiful typography, and understated colors in their branding.
Have a look around you - really exclusive stuff comes in the simplest, most discrete packaging.
For illustration purposes, I have paired the logos of brands that are in the same industry / or produce similar products, but are on the polar opposites of the pricing spectrum:

The first thing you notice is the color. What's up with all the red? Now I know why one of my branding design idols, Ivan Chermayeff once said, "When in doubt make it red, if you are still in doubt make it big."

Why are "mass" brands more colorful and have more "design" in their logos than their more expensive counterparts? I have thought about it and here it goes:
(Bear in mind, this is purely my opinion and I maybe completely wrong.)

When we are young children, (and I am constantly reminded of that, because I have 7 year old twins), our brains are developing, and we are impressed by the novelty of new colors everywhere. They are fun and playful and casual and go by the names of blood orange, lilac, aqua and fuschia. Same goes for the overly ornate letters and typography. Kids, when they write, create simple letterforms, and they always love it when you write in cursive. They want to learn it, just to show their friends how advanced they are. (BTW, when I was a kid growing up in Cyprus, our teachers never taught us cursive, but I loved it so much, that I taught myself how.
(I am still trying to get it to look right, but that's a whole different blog altogether.)
Cursive has a lot to do with exclusivity and marks of luxury and sophistication, probably stemming from the quill era, but after being done badly so many times, I believe that ship has sailed.

Back to the story.
As we get older, we evolve, we get to see more, experience more and interact with more. We slowly shift  to a more understated, more conservative and dare I say "safe," tried and true design.  Mies van der Rohe once said "It is better to be good than to be original."  I tend to agree.
Because we have experienced the playfulness and the fickleness of color and ornate, fleeting, design in our youth, we have outgrown it. Been there, done that. We have progressed and we yearn for something simpler, more "established."
In our middle age, (the prime target market for luxury brands), we are also about experiences. We want our experience to be one of sophistication and elegance, worth both our money and time. So my point is we associate bright colors with a stage of our naive, less sophisticated, less picky, younger selves. And thus we dismiss a company's offerings, because the experience will most likely, match their whole branding. If you show up in a new city and money were no object, and you had to choose between two restaurants on your first night.  One had an over designed logo with colors etc and the other had a simple clean word type, with white letters set on a dark grey background. Both serve the same cuisine.
Both are good. Which one would you pick? I would pick the latter. Wouldn't you?

But lest we forget, not everyone has the same experiences, so these mass brands go with the lowest common denominator. The "pop" of color - the overly designed word mark or logo, the path of least resistance. And because less expensive brands want to sell the most to the most customers, adding red and making it big is certainly one way of getting their attention.