La versione in italiano è qui https://acatalani.wordpress.com/2026/09/18/quanto-lava-bene-una-kelly/

Try something. Put a washing machine next to a Hermès handbag and ask yourself which one does the laundry better. It is a ridiculous question, I know. But it is exactly the question that, unfortunately, a great many managers, and no small number of consultants, insist on asking when they have to value a luxury product. They look at performance. They look at materials. They look at price against cost. And they convince themselves they have understood something.

They have understood nothing.

Luxury does not sell objects. It sells meaning. A Hermès bag is not there to carry your house keys, or rather, it does that too, but it is not why people wait years on a list and pay sums that would make a cost analyst turn pale. Function is little more than a pretext. The real product is what that bag says about the person carrying it, and to the person carrying it: what it tells of a world, a story, a sense of belonging.

This kind of good has a precise name: a symbolic good. One whose value comes, largely or entirely, from the meaning it carries, not from the function it performs. This is not something I invented, nor the latest trick dreamt up by some clever PR firm: take a good look at a few old master paintings and you will see it for yourself. Anthropologists have known this for a century; consumer sociologists have been saying it for decades. The trouble is that the people who run luxury companies, and the people who teach them in business schools, still treat it as though it were a fridge with a logo stuck on the front.

And that is exactly where it falls apart. Because if the value lies in the meaning, the way you assess it has to be different too. Margins, market share, customer satisfaction are not enough: those measure a washing machine perfectly well, and a meaning very badly indeed. What is needed are tools built specifically for symbolic goods, not ones borrowed from generalist management and bent out of shape to fit.

Let’s be clear about this from the start, so there is no confusion. The symbolic good itself cannot be calculated: meaning does not fit into a formula, and anyone who tries is practising bad science. But the ingredients needed to build it can be assessed, fairly objectively, even without reducing them to a single number.

I understand the frustration of anyone who comes from a world of numbers. Meaning seems to be the sort of thing that slips through your fingers: it will not sit in a spreadsheet, it will not show up on a graph. Faced with a symbolic good, plenty of managers simply give up. They file it under ‘soft’: storytelling, emotion, marketing material, not something for people who make real decisions. That is a mistake, and fortunately there is a way out that does not ask you to take anyone’s word for it. You do not measure the meaning itself: you measure what it costs to sustain it. A claim of excellence that costs its maker nothing, true or false, is just hot air, cheap talk, as the game theorists call it. A claim backed by a choice with a real price, a choice that anyone lacking the quality in question would either have no reason to make or simply could not make, is an entirely different matter. This is called signalling theory, it has been around for fifty years, and it turns meaning from an unprovable feeling into something even the most numbers-driven manager can check. One common misunderstanding is worth heading off here: the point is not that the costly choice is hard to copy. Anyone, in principle, could make it. The point is that it does not pay a mediocre producer to make it: the cost is never recouped, because without the real quality behind it, the signal delivers no return. This is not, first and foremost, a technical barrier; it is an economic disincentive. And it is precisely that disincentive, not a patent or a trade secret, that makes the signal credible.

I am working on this on two fronts at once: a popular book on one side, an academic article I am writing for an international marketing journal on the other. In the article I try to do properly what here I can only sketch out: turning ‘you know it when you see it’ into a verifiable definition, made up of precise conditions that an outside observer, with no privileged access to the company, can check one by one. No formulas today, I will spare you those. But the principle is the same: luxury is recognised by conditions, not by a feeling.

A preview, for anyone who wants to arrive prepared: those costly signals turn into genuine parameters for luxury. Let’s see what happens once we line them up. The answer is not a single number. It is a grid of criteria, distinct and stated plainly, each open to argument on its own terms. Less convenient than one tidy score, I admit. But honest, at least.

Next time someone suggests judging luxury by the same yardstick as a washing machine, ask them a simple question: how well does a Kelly do the laundry? If they cannot answer, it might be time to change yardsticks.