Hermès is one of the most desired brands in the world. And yet, for years, it has insisted that it doesn't do marketing — it even says it has no marketing department. Put that way, it sounds like a contradiction. How can one of the most iconic houses on the planet walk away from the very thing everyone treats as essential to selling?
The answer is simpler than it looks. Hermès does market itself. It just doesn't do that marketing — the kind almost everyone takes for granted. And understanding the difference is the first step to seeing why so many artisan, creative, and high-end businesses struggle to grow even when their product is extraordinary.
What marketing actually is
At its core, marketing is the function that studies the market and the customer in order to build demand around a company's products. Over the last few decades the discipline has been refined into a set of principles so effective they've become close to law — think of Al Ries and Jack Trout, of Positioning and The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing. These are real rules. They work. But they were written for a specific economic context — industry — and they're optimized for it.
The logic of the industrial market
In the industrial market, growth follows a simple line: more demand leads to more production, which leads to more sales and more revenue. When a product can be replicated almost without limit, marketing has one job — keep pushing demand up. It's a perfectly coherent system. As long as the product is industrial.
What changes in the world of craft
Step into craft, creativity, and the high end, and that logic starts to break. Because production doesn't scale infinitely. Every piece takes time, skill, control, materials, and people. And that is exactly what makes it desirable. But the same quality that creates the value also makes it far more expensive to produce.
It is why, throughout history, even remarkable companies have hit real financial trouble. Ferrari itself, before the Montezemolo era, had to rethink its entire business model. The problem was never building extraordinary cars — it already knew how to do that. The problem was building a sustainable company around a product that couldn't be treated like an industrial one.
Where "anti-marketing" comes from
When Hermès says it doesn't do marketing, it isn't saying it doesn't communicate, doesn't know its customers, or doesn't want to sell. It is saying something far more precise: that marketing built to endlessly inflate demand and volume is the wrong model for a company like it.
And this is the point that changes everything. Hermès isn't anti-marketing. Hermès is anti-industrial-marketing. There is no war on marketing here — only the recognition that two different economic models exist, with opposite logics. The marketing of industrial production, which lives on ever-growing volume. And the marketing of scarcity, craft, and the high end, where the goal isn't to sell more, but to raise perceived value, protect margin, and keep the product desirable over time.
A different strategy for a different business
This is where what we call Artisan Anti-Marketing begins. Not because it is against marketing, but because it questions the habit of applying industrial-market rules to businesses that were never industrial to begin with.
In the coming articles we'll go deeper. First, the shift in mindset an artisan, creative, or high-end brand has to make when it thinks about the strategy behind selling its products — because that is the detail where all the difference lives. Then we'll share the 18 Laws of Artisan Anti-Marketing, drawn from watching some of the most iconic houses in the world.