At a sunglasses store, you’ll often see competing brands stacked next to each other, positioned for easy comparison.

For example, Oakley:

Author via Amazon

And Ray-Ban:

Author via Amazon

Are often seen as competitors. A sales rep will offer you varying accounts on each. People even argue over which is best.

Yet within all this silly sunglasses buzz, you’ve all been fooled and don’t even know it.

The First Big Catch

Ray-Bans, Oakleys, and all these seeming competitors —are owned by the same company: Luxottica.

It’s a fact the company keeps fairly hidden. They build up the rivalry between brands, having employees write arguments in comment sections. They run competing advertisements to validate that tension.

The next time you buy sunglasses, there’s a good chance you see ‘Made in Italy’ somewhere on the product.

Guess where Luxottica is based.

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They don’t just do this with sunglasses. They also own 80% of the eyewear market, including Lens Crafters, Pearle Vision, Oliver People’s. They’re also sole manufacturers for Prada, Chanel, Dolce Gabbana, and Ralph Lauren.

These fake rivalries give the company leverage to hike up their prices. Imagine running commercials against your own products.

But today? Nearly a billion people wear Luxottica eyewear and don’t even know it.

Luxottica’s strategy is common in fight promotions. Promoters hold press conferences with two combatants sitting and acting like they genuinely hate one another. In reality, the two fighters are often texting jokes to each other in their off-hours. Most fighters beat each other up every day in training. It’s normal for them. We sit here thinking it’s a blood feud and open our wallets.

Luxottica’s marketing strategy more resembles professional wrestling — which makes just as much money as any fighting sport.

The Added Brilliance of This Maneuver

Ultimately, a marketer’s job is to increase the perceived value of a given product above its intrinsic need (“This isn’t just any pencil…”). It’s all about the pizazz.

If you go back 20 years, you’d find that most mid-range sunglasses sold for a mere $30-$40.

Today, it’s hard to find comparable units without paying hundreds of dollars. Meanwhile, there’s been no significant increase in the quality of their products to coincide with that price inflation.

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The above glasses have well above a 60% profit margin.

Has Luxottica done this via brilliant marketing? Or is this a monopoly in practice?

They’re certainly a price maker (they set a price and everyone follows).

Luxottica claims, defensively, that they aren’t a monopoly, that they’ve simply revolutionized how we see glasses, making them cool versus years prior:

Revenge of The Nerds (Author via IMDB)

They say they put the investment upfront, creating a product that has more mass appeal.

But that is only a partial truth — they acquired most of the brands in the 2000s. They also own the manufacturing and distribution facilities.

In Luxottica's defense, they aren’t the only ones playing the ‘secret competitors game’. Many of General Motors Brands seem in competition:

Author via Market Realist

Shampoo brands like L’Oréal and Estée Lauder are the same company. Proctor & Gamble owns a ton of competing products.

The conclusion and takeaway

As marketers, we need to think laterally about what we are doing. Marketing isn’t a silo that lives independent of externalities. It’s at the mercy of finance, competition, personalities, supply chains, access to resources, and more.

I don’t know that buying your competitors is a tangible step for most of us. Luxottica is more a case study, to understand the value of turning left when others turn right.

Ultimately, this is all about the illusion of choice. You can do it with prices, making your one product way more expensive, just to make your high-margin product more appealing. And you can do it by inventing a nemesis brand. Choose your poison.

I’ll end with a famous marketing joke that best illustrates this. It’s called “Two Beggars”:

Two beggars are sitting side by side on a street in Rome.

One has a cross in front of him; the other one the Star of David. Many people go by and look at both beggars, but only put money into the hat of the beggar sitting behind the cross.

A priest comes by, stops and watches throngs of people giving money to the beggar behind the cross, but none give to the beggar behind the Star of David.

Finally, the priest goes over to the beggar behind the Star of David and says, “My poor fellow, don’t you understand? This is a Catholic country; this city is the seat of Catholicism. People aren’t going to give you money if you sit there with a Star of David in front of you, especially when you’re sitting beside a beggar who has a cross. In fact, they would probably give to him just out of spite.”

The beggar behind the Star of David listened to the priest, turned to the other beggar with the cross and said: “Moishe, look who’s trying to teach the Goldstein brothers about marketing.”