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Thomai Serdari    

Adjunct Associate Professor & Strategist in Luxury Marketing

Thomai Serdari, Ph.D. is a strategist in luxury marketing and branding. She helps clients launch, grow, and successfully manage luxury brands. She is an expert on luxury and actively studies, values, and reports on companies or funds that operate and invest within the luxury goods market.

Prof. Serdari has been teaching at New York University since 2004. She has developed a variety of courses at NYU, among which: "Cultures of Excess: Product and Fashion Design through Modernity" and "Entrepreneurship in the Business of Art." She also developed the core courses for the Luxury Marketing specialization at the Leonard N. Stern School of Business, MBA level: "The Core of Luxury: Processes, Products, and Strategies through History," "Luxury Branding: Brand Thinking and Experience," and "Luxury Launch: Designing & Marketing a Luxury Product/Project/Enterprise."

Originally trained as an architect at the National Technical University of Athens, Prof. Serdari received her doctorate in Art History & Archaeology from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University in 2005. She also holds an MBA from the Leonard N. Stern School of Business, New York University, with a specialization in corporate and quantitative finance (2009).

Heavily drawing on her interdisciplinary training, Prof. Serdari launched PIQLuxury, a membership organization that serves as an information gateway to culture, the questions that define it and the trends that will impact the future of creative business, premium and luxury brands.She contributes opinion pieces to Luxury Daily and is the co-editor of the first academic interdisciplinary journal on Luxury: History, Culture, Consumption published by Bloomsbury Press.

Prof. Serdari is one of the main contributors to the LVMH Fundamentals in Luxury Retail: A CPC/Parsons Collaboration, an education program designed to train and provide a wide range of retail skills to Chinese-Americans.

Speech Topics

What Luxury Brands Can Teach Us: Capture the Value Your Customers Expect

No matter how the economy is doing, luxury brands have the power to attract established and new customers, even in times of crisis. Understanding how they do that is imperative in today’s market. In this thought-provoking talk, you can see how your brand can easily align with a few fundamental laws of luxury marketing and how this will directly impact the growth of your brand equity. It is inspirational to learn from industries outside your own and to envision the possibilities of where you can take your brand. The learnings are applicable across functions from the marketing team to the innovation team to operations and beyond. Leaders of companies of any size can benefit from frameworks that will motivate them to act and move the needle in the direction of success.

Attendee Results:

  • Learn how to analyze brands that do well through innovative frameworks
  • Understand the critical role of consumer psychology and how you can address a variety of types
  • Experience what your brand could look or feel like by taking a deep dive into powerful examples
  • Learn the methodology behind rethinking how the various teams that drive your brand relate to the growth of your brand’s equity

Retailing: Direct to Consumer, Brick & Mortar, and Partnerships

The world of retailing is evolving rapidly, and the number of options available to brands to reach their consumer are multiplying. This detailed talk will teach you the specifics of a variety of retail channels and whether your brand is taking advantage of the options that are best aligned with its DNA. A brand cannot be everything to all consumers. Therefore, retailing is part of branding. This presentation will help leadership assess which path is the best for where the brand is right now in its path of growth as well as what the next milestones could be.

Attendee Results:

  • Full understanding of the value of a variety of retail options
  • Deep dive into retailers who fully command their channels
  • Assessment of the retail channels that are appropriate for your specific consumer segments
  • Understanding of how a brand can expand into a new consumer segment and which new retail option is the appropriate one

Cultural Branding: The Most Innovative Way to Think about Your Brand

There are many branding frameworks used by companies every day. Why are so few brands culturally relevant today? And when did your leadership check to assess how your brand is faring in our contemporary culture that places more and more demands on how brands appear, how they speak, and how they behave both externally and internally? To understand Gen Z and the new generation of consumers is to think and rethink your own brand in a completely innovative way.

Attendee Results:

  • Learn what Gen Z (and Gen Alpha) want from you
  • Deep dive into the areas where there is overlap between your older customers and the new generation that is reshaping the marketplace
  • Assess the power of your own brand through frameworks that allow you to capitalize on the work you have been doing while pivoting into a new direction
  • Chart the specific milestones your brand should achieve in order to continue adjusting to the new cultural norms

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