Luxury Marketing in 2026: How to Grow When the Buyer Pool Keeps Shrinking

TL;DR

• Global luxury spending held at €1,443 billion in 2025. Personal luxury goods sat at €358 billion and are forecast to grow 2–4% in 2026.
• The market stabilised. The customer base did not. Luxury consumers fell from roughly 400 million in 2022 to around 340 million in 2025.
• New customer acquisition dropped 5% between 2024 and 2025. Active shoppers fell from about 60% of the addressable base in 2022 to 40–45% in 2025.
• Around half of luxury consumers now use AI somewhere in their purchase journey. Two out of three of those use it to compare products.
• Half of luxury shoppers check the secondhand market before buying anything new.
• The practical consequence: acquisition media has to work harder, discovery has moved into video and AI answers, and measurement built on clicks no longer explains what happened.

The signal: a stable market sitting on a smaller customer base

The headline numbers for luxury in 2026 read calmly. Worldwide luxury spending reached €1,443 billion in 2025, and Bain & Company's spring 2026 update to the Bain-Altagamma Luxury Goods Worldwide Market Study expects personal luxury goods to grow 2% to 4% this year, reaching €365–373 billion. Around 60% of luxury players are already outperforming their Q1 2025 results.

The number underneath is less comfortable. Bain's November 2025 edition of the same study found the luxury consumer base has fallen from about 400 million people in 2022 to roughly 340 million in 2025. New customer acquisition declined 5% between 2024 and 2025. Active luxury shoppers dropped from around 60% of the total addressable base in 2022 to 40–45% in 2025.

Switzerland shows the same pattern in a single category. Swiss watch exports in the first half of 2026 came to CHF 12.8 billion, down 0.7% against the first half of 2025. Wristwatch exports fell 0.6% in value while the number of items shipped rose. Stable revenue, more units, thinner value per unit.

So the market is flat to slightly up. The number of people who consider themselves luxury buyers is materially smaller than it was four years ago.

Why a stable market with fewer buyers is a harder marketing problem

Here is how the pressure compounds. Margins came down first. Industry operating margins for personal luxury goods brands have fallen to roughly 15–16%, down from a peak near 23% in 2012. Fewer than half of personal luxury goods brands grew revenue in 2025. When margins compress, marketing budgets get examined line by line, and the lines that cannot be defended with evidence get cut.

Meanwhile, the entry point to the category moved. Boston Consulting Group research cited in TikTok's 2025 luxury study found that around two-thirds of first-time luxury buyers name social media, rather than traditional offline media, as their first contact with the category. 

TikTok's own survey of more than 3,000 luxury consumers across the UK, US, France and Italy reported that 70% of its luxury audience have spent over £1,000 on a single fashion item, that 38% discover luxury brands through user-generated content and 32% through creator videos, and that 26% wait for a creator review before buying. That research is vendor-commissioned and should be read as directional rather than independent. The direction is consistent with what Bain reports.

Then the comparison step moved again. Bain's 2026 update found that roughly half of luxury consumers already use AI somewhere in the buying journey, with nearly all of them planning to continue. About one in four use it for brand and product discovery. Two out of three use it for product comparison.

And a resale checkpoint now sits between consideration and purchase. Half of all luxury shoppers check the secondhand market before buying new, and online searches for vintage bags have more than doubled year on year.

Put together: fewer buyers, more expensive acquisition, and three discovery layers that a brand's own media plan does not control.

Sources: Bain & Company / Altagamma, November 2025 and June 2026 editions of the Luxury Goods Worldwide Market Study.

Seven approaches that hold up under scrutiny in 2026

1. Rebuild the aspirational entry point instead of defending only the top

The consumers who left were mostly aspirational buyers, and price increases pushed many of them out. Bain reports that more than 70% of customers who stepped away from luxury intend to return, though not necessarily to the same brands. In the US, upper-middle-class households are now growing their luxury spending at roughly twice the rate of wealthier cohorts, and under-35 consumers are spending about four percentage points faster than older ones.

Operationally, this means an acquisition layer, funded separately from clienteling. The pain point is measurable: if new customer acquisition falls 5% a year while top-client revenue stays flat, the revenue base narrows even when total sales look steady. Entry-price categories — fragrance, eyewear, small leather goods, jewellery — carry that layer. Jewellery, eyewear and fragrances were the strongest categories in Bain's 2025 and 2026 readings.

2. Treat AI-mediated discovery as a channel with its own optimisation

When a buyer asks an assistant to compare two watches or explain the difference between two leather grades, the brand either appears in that answer or it does not. Generative engine optimization for brands is the work of making sure a brand's own material is structured so that AI systems can retrieve and cite it accurately.

The practical checklist is unglamorous: definition-first paragraphs that stand alone without surrounding context, FAQ and Article schema on product and editorial pages, published specifications, dated statistics, and named authors. Research from Princeton, Georgia Tech and the Allen Institute found that comparison articles containing cited statistics account for a large share of AI citations. Brands that publish only campaign imagery give these systems nothing to quote.

3. Move video targeting from declared interest to on-screen context

This is where most luxury media plans currently lose money, and where the fix is concrete.

Signal quality on video platforms has degraded. Google confirmed in April 2025 that it would not deprecate third-party cookies in Chrome, then announced in October 2025 that it would retire most Privacy Sandbox APIs. Safari, Firefox and Brave still block third-party cookies by default, which leaves roughly 17–20% of global traffic cookieless regardless of what Chrome does. Cookies are unreliable rather than absent, which is a harder planning problem than a clean deadline would have been.

The default fallback — platform interest segments — is too coarse for luxury. Interest categories bundle very different intent levels into one bucket. The result is wasted spend and reach numbers that do not translate into landing engagement.

Contextual video advertising works from a different input. Instead of inferring who someone is, it reads what is on screen and places the ad next to matching content. PXLSTRM, Adello's patented AI contextual targeting product for YouTube, TikTok and Pinterest, analyses video at the level of objects, scenes and spoken dialogue, then clusters millions of videos by semantic similarity into behaviour-aligned categories including Luxury, Fashion, Shopping, Sport and Travel. No cookies and no user-level data are involved.

What that changes in practice, based on Adello's own reported results:

• Comparative tests against YouTube TrueView showed close to 30% in media savings while reaching more on-topic audiences.
• TikTok tests reported a 2–3x uplift in landing page engagement.
• Pinterest support across Germany, Austria and Switzerland launched in March 2026, with reach to roughly 24 million users in those markets.

Want to learn more about how PXLSTRM can benefit your business? Book a call with us by filling out the form:

4. Plan for the resale checkpoint rather than around it

Half of luxury shoppers now consult the secondhand market before buying new. In watches, Bain notes that connoisseurship is overtaking hype, with collectors rewarding craftsmanship and rarity, and that this is feeding resale momentum.

The operational question is whether a brand's own material answers what a buyer checks on a resale platform: authentication, provenance, servicing, condition standards, and what a piece holds over time. Brands that publish nothing on these points hand the conversation to third-party listings and creator commentary. TikTok's research found that one in four luxury shoppers on the platform have bought a secondhand item prompted by content there.

5. Shift measurement from clicks to attention, viewability and brand lift

Click-through rate is a weak proxy in a category where the purchase may happen months later in a boutique. Two measurements carry more weight.

Viewability establishes whether the impression was seen at all. Adello guarantees up to 100% viewability on its campaigns and prices on a viewable CPM basis. Attention measurement goes one step further and estimates how long an ad held focus. A brand lift survey closes the loop by testing whether exposed audiences shifted on awareness, consideration, or intent against a control group.

A workable minimum for a luxury campaign in 2026:

6. Follow the spend into experiences

Consumer sentiment toward experiences is outgrowing tangible goods by 1.5x so far in 2026. Luxury hospitality, private jets, yachts and cruises are holding up. Immersive bookings across dining, leisure and entertainment are up 30% year on year, and travel to destinations outside the traditional hotspots has grown 20%.

For a marketing team, that is a media planning instruction rather than a philosophical one. Audiences for experiential luxury are reachable through travel intent, tourist and expat targeting, and location-based mobile advertising near flagship districts and resort areas. It also argues for an omnichannel advertising strategy that connects mobile, video and digital out-of-home rather than treating them as separate line items.

7. Fix inventory quality before adding reach

Brand safety in luxury is a pricing issue, not only a reputational one. Adello's internal analysis puts 65% of all programmatic inventory as either fraudulent or misclassified. If that figure is even approximately right for a given supply path, then a third of a media budget is buying nothing, and some of the remainder is buying placements a luxury brand would never approve manually.

Practical controls: whitelisted inventory only, pre-bid filtering of invalid traffic, keyword-level exclusions per campaign, and a review of where the ad actually appeared rather than where it was booked. This is the cheapest of the seven approaches to implement and usually the one that shows up fastest in performance.

Why this matters in the next two quarters

The 2026 recovery is uneven and regionally split. The Americas are growing while Europe and the Middle East drag, with international tourist spending in Europe down around 20% in February before a partial rebound, and the Gulf luxury consumer base shrinking 15–25% in early 2026. Bain assigns 70% probability to its 2–4% growth base case, which depends on Middle East stabilisation and a gradual recovery in Chinese demand.

That combination — modest growth, high variance, and a customer base that has not been rebuilt — puts a premium on media that can be measured and adjusted quickly. Brands that spend the second half of 2026 fixing signal quality, publishing material AI systems can cite, and testing contextual video against their current interest-based buys will enter 2027 with an acquisition engine. Brands that wait will be bidding for the same shrinking pool with the same tools that stopped working.

Luxury did not lose its appetite. It lost about 60 million buyers and gained three discovery layers it does not own. Those two facts explain most of what feels difficult about luxury marketing in 2026. The work now is unremarkable and specific: rebuild the entry point, be legible to AI, target video on what is actually on screen, and measure attention instead of clicks.

Created with the help of AI.