Posted by Leonard Steinberg on March 21st, 2014

SOTHEBY’S International Realty distributed a rather impressive large LUXURY SHOWCASE booklet in the Wall Street Journal this morning: while the content was good with many lavish suburban properties advertised for sale, and some statistics about the luxury market and consumer, what was most telling was how bilingual is changing: the text on the ads are delivered in English and CHINESE. Amazing how things change: those annoying messages on the phone that ask whether you’d like to be spoken to in English or Spanish could be shifting. Is bilingual text Chinese only for the luxury market and Spanish for the masses?

In the South of France it used to be that much of the luxury communication was done in French, English and Arabic: recently, Russian has taken over. I guess you could call this the evolution of global luxury market communication.