Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…For sure, there's a lot of survivorship bias here. I suspect that Bernard did have a view that almost nobody else had, which was that both those luxury brands, and particularly, Louis Vuitton and leather good luxury brands could get bigger than anyone imagined, and he was right on that. I think he also had a view that the Lindy effect of these brands is bigger than anyone realizes. Even when a brand falls on hard times, if it has enough heritage and provenance, you can bring it back. Let's do this as a thought exercise. Could you permanently destroy the Hermes brand, the Louis Vuitton brand, or the Tiffany's brand? You could certainly temporarily destroy it. We told a few of those stories in this episode, but could you permanently forever wipe it from the face of the earth? You could. You would need it to be bad for 60-plus years because I think you needed to be bad for an entire human lifetime adult memory. I think some of the reasons why Gucci survives is because even if you don't know Gucci being good in the last 10 years, there are a lot of people alive who recall it being something prestigious. But yeah, they're hard to destroy. I think the likelihood that that would happen is extremely low, because whatever company is currently managing that brand, would go bankrupt at a certain point, or would change control or whatever. There's just too much incentive now for somebody outside to come in, buy it, and resuscitate it. And the shelf life is so long. I think you're right. You would have to have a dormant period of a human lifetime to permanently kill one of these brands. That was certainly the case with Dior that Bernard I think recognized more than anybody else.…

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