Luxury branding frames a good as premium so that a high price reads as a signal of quality and status rather than as a cost to be justified. Some of the premium is real — better materials, tighter tolerances, genuine craft. The manipulative portion is the part of the price supported only by image, in which the label, not the object, is doing the work.
The mechanism is old. Veblen described how conspicuously expensive goods function precisely because they are expensive: the price is the message, advertising that the owner can afford what others cannot. Costly-signaling theory, articulated by the biologist Amotz Zahavi, generalizes the point — a signal is credible in proportion to what it costs to send — which is why a premium price can feel like proof of worth even when the underlying quality is ordinary.
Luxury positioning becomes manipulation when the story and the status displace the question of value, when comparison is treated as gauche, or when ambiguous authenticity lets a label’s premium attach to goods that don’t carry it. The defense is not cynicism about quality; genuine excellence exists and is worth paying for. It is to price the function separately from the signal, and to buy the signal, if at all, as a deliberate choice.