Consumer Engagement Through Contemporary Art – Fondazione Prada

This paper is centred on exploring art foundations owned by luxury fashion brands as a potential venue for engaging with the luxury fashion consumer in a meaningful relationship, and without undermining the exclusivity and the controlled access of the luxury product. Specifically, this paper focuses on Fondazione Prada. It will be explained that a more authentic and “peer-to-peer” dialogue is essential to strengthening the relationship with the consumer. For this to happen in the luxury environment without undermining the exclusivity of the luxury product, art foundations might be the preferable venue. In this paper, the concept of Consumer Engagement is associated to the more general concept of public engagement with the arts. For the purpose of this paper, public engagement is an active participation of both producer and receiver of art (Edmonds, Bilda, & Muller, 2009) in a two-way conversation (National Co-ordinating Centre for Public Engagement, 2014) with regards to understanding the arts and with the scope of generating benefits and wellbeing (Belfiore, 2002; Hoey, Zutis, Leuty, & Mihailidis, 2010; Kay, 2000). Finally, this two-way conversation has to be free from power structures and hierarchies; the people involved have to act as and perceived to be equals (Lanz & Montanari, 2014; Men & Tsai, 2016).