I agree with everything that you've said. Mass marketing is a double-edged sword. A lot of these powerhouses (I'm more familiar with LV) have to delicately balance marketing while maintaining its exclusivity. Chanel tries to circumvent this by incorporating these ridiculous quarterly price hikes (a classic chanel flap bag is now approximately $4,0000
) and now LV is trying to catch up by increasing their prices as well (two as of this year...with a rumored third to take place before 2012) upon realizing that they are no longer as exclusive as they'd like to be. I see girls walking around with LV bags around campus all the time. Not all of them are real of course...but still. Louis Vuitton is not as exclusive as it once was due to (in my opinion) using mainstream celebrities for their marketing campaigns. What's even more unfortunate is that the craftmanship is not getting better as the value increases...quite the opposite from the looks of it. I can't begin to count how many complaints I've read about the canvas peeling, uneven stitching, piping issues with couture purses nowadays...I don't know I'm a sucker for history, craftmanship, and customer service...however it seems that none of the brands are achieving any of the latter two.
Now MY rant is over.
