When Jimmy Choo released its autumn 2025 campaign featuring Sydney Sweeney, some social media commenters lamented the brand’s choice of the star following American Eagle’s controversy-addled “Good Jeans” ad starring the actress. But it illuminated a broader issue the luxury industry is facing: An epidemic of sameness.

The Choo campaign, featuring Sweeney starring as different “characters” to represent the various accessories she’s wearing, was the brand’s second time spotlighting the actress (its first was in summer 2024). It was also one of many featuring the star, who has been the face of brands including beauty lines Laneige and Dr. Squatch. And while it depicted the versatility of Jimmy Choo’s line of shoes, the campaign largely lacked a narrative angle that differentiated it from others in the luxury space.

Just a few months prior, Givenchy released its autumn campaign — its first under new creative director Sarah Burton — featuring model Kaia Gerber who, like Sweeney, has appeared in countless brand campaigns from Mango to DKNY. The ads were meant to illustrate the creative relationship between women at work, showing seemingly candid moments between Gerber and the campaign’s director Halina Reijn, script in hand.

It’s illustrative of a larger problem in the industry. The de facto luxury marketing playbook — a combination of splashy collaborations and celebrity-fronted campaigns, over-the-top runway shows attended by of-the-moment influencers and alignment with hot cultural assets, whether it’s “Wicked” or the US Open — is delivering diminishing returns.

For many brands, marketing has devolved into a neverending game of one-upmanship for consumer attention at the expense of creativity and compelling storytelling. In turn, shoppers, with endless options for entertainment, have learned to tune brands out.

“We’re in the era of content clutter,” said Halie Soprano, senior influencer marketing consultant for creator marketing platform Traackr. The antidote is to “focus on fewer, strategic narratives that really allow the audience to connect with them and feel something,” she said.

‘Bludgeoned by Luxury’

In the midst of a luxury downturn, with US consumer sentiment approaching its lowest levels of all time in November, marketers have taken to chasing attention to stay above water.

But that strategy is backfiring for many brands, contributing to the feeling that luxury isn’t worth the spend anymore. An endless stream of capsules, collections and collaborations — all marketed through countless shows, red carpets and activations — have become a blur to consumers, who can barely keep track of who is releasing the content they’re seeing, or what differentiates one brand from another.

Or as Chanel watches and jewellery president, Frédéric Grangié, put it to the Swiss newspaper Le Temps: “Consumers are tired of being bludgeoned by luxury.”

Rather than competing for virality in the short-term, the brands that stand out in this oversaturated environment focus on what makes them unique — in essence, what is right in front of them.

“To some degree, you have to simplify,” said Milton Pedraza, founder and chief executive of the consultancy Luxury Institute.

Moncler’s October campaign featuring Robert De Niro and Al Pacino, for example, leaned into the brand’s core value proposition — warmth — and tied it back to the decades-long friendship between the actors. By leaning into emotion, the brand was rewarded with its top-performing owned media placement of the year, according to the brand performance platform Launchmetrics.

Self-Aware Storytelling

In the September campaign for the revival of Chloé’s Paddington handbag, which had its heyday in the early 2000s, the brand hired Kendall Jenner – following in the footsteps of countless other brands, from Prada to Alo Yoga.

Despite her ubiquity, the campaign was exceptionally well-received by audiences, and contributed to the second wave of popularity for the Phoebe Philo-designed handbag. The secret touch? Jenner starred alongside other celebrities that lack her exposure in the fashion world, including Aimee Lou Wood of “White Lotus” fame and singer Anna of K-pop group Meovv. In the ads, they starred as enviable Parisiennes, toting their Paddingtons around the city in classic Chloé style.

The campaign also worked because it didn’t just hire it-girls as part of an otherwise generic campaign; their girl-about-town status itself is central to the bag’s DNA. Indeed, two decades ago, Chloé similarly tapped it-girls of the moment like Lindsay Lohan and Megan Fox to give the bag its cachet.

Famous faces remain an important piece of successful campaigns, but they don’t need to be the entire puzzle.

In its spring campaign called “Craft Is Our Language,” Bottega Veneta highlighted the handicraft that goes into weaving its “intrecciato” leather. While the ads featured well-known names, including Julianne Moore, Tyler, The Creator and Zadie Smith, the focus was on their stories about how they use their hands in their own craft.

The campaign also felt uniquely suited to Bottega Veneta. Under Matthieu Blazy’s creative direction, and continuing under Louise Trotter, craftsmanship has been central to the brand’s appeal as it feels increasingly rare and refreshing as luxury has become commodified.

“Consumers want to be convinced by the brand that their branding, ethos, values and aesthetic aligns with their own,” said Hanushka Toni, chief executive of luxury resale platform Sellier.

The same strategy can work for trend-driven (and trend-driving) brands, too. Miu Miu has managed a years-long hot streak by telling stories rooted in a celebration of womanhood, whether by selling unabashedly girly mini-skirts and dresses or through its Literary Club event series, in which women discuss works by female authors. For the August launch of its new fragrance, Miutine, the brand sent creators the perfume along with miniature microphones and a set of questions to answer on camera, giving fans the tools to create unscripted marketing that, once again, centres on the female experience.

The smartest marketers will see room for evolution. Robert Burke, a luxury consultant, said that while the industry is undoubtedly at an inflection point, it will likely force brands to get more creative and look beyond buzz to how they can create special, memorable touchpoints through which customers can truly feel a moment of connection with the brand’s world.

“The old formula that had worked so incredibly well and was so predictable is no longer as applicable,” said Burke. “It’s a great opportunity. Sometimes these hard resets are good for everyone.”

Misled by Metrics

A move away from chasing virality also requires a rethink of how brands measure marketing success.

One of the fashion industry’s standard marketing measures, earned media value, calculates how much visibility, or virality, a marketing moment received. But while it provides a general barometer for the number of eyeballs on an ad, it fails to translate consumer perception.

Crucially, these metrics give little insight into whether content reflects what its creator is trying to say and instead prioritises visibility over all other considerations.

Several platforms have been tweaking their metrics to provide a fuller picture. Launchmetrics rolled out an update to its media impact value score in August, using AI to scrape online conversations and content to measure how aligned marketing moments are with customer perception of a brand’s identity, said Launchmetrics’ chief marketing officer, Alison Bringé.

BoF’s own AI-driven insights tool, Insights Brand Pulse, analyses conversations around different marketing moments. Traackr, too, accounts for how aligned content is with a brand’s identity through its brand vitality score.

But of course, no one metric can fully communicate how a campaign is landing, and cannot be looked at “in a vacuum,” said Alex Rawitz, director of research and insights at CreatorIQ.

“You can have a lot of people talking about you, but it’s not necessarily a good thing,” said Rawitz.