Dr. Daniel A. Langer

Dr. Daniel André Langer is Senior Vice President and General Manager Henkel Beauty Care North America at Henkel Consumer Goods Inc. Before that, he fulfilled several local and global responsibilities, at Henkel including global responsibility for the Hair Care and Body Care SBUs and as CVP / Marketing Head for Germany and Japan. Previously, at Nestlé and L'Oréal he held positions in Sales and Marketing. He is board member of the Personal Care Product Council in USA and served on the Business Advisory Council of the Marketing Science Institute MSI. He was instrumental in developing and launching several global top innovations in Beauty Care.

He is also a Research Fellow and Senior Lecturer for Marketing and Luxury Management at Universities in Zurich and Mainz, where is also co-director of the Center for Research on Luxury. The Research Center has the aim to pioneer the research on luxury marketing and provide world-class scientific insights for the management of luxury goods. Additionally, he is author of several publications on marketing, management & luxury.

Dr. Langer holds a Ph.D. and a Masters degree from the University of Mainz, additionally he studied in Madrid at UAM and attended executive education at Harvard Business School, IESE Business School and Thunderbird School of Global Management.

He has become a leading global expert on luxury marketing & management. His doctoral thesis was one of the first comprehensive dissections of what it takes to successfully manage luxury brands, and even more fundamentally, what luxury is all about. In his University classes for students and top managers he teaches the latest scientifically derived tools to manage luxury in a more successful way. In the course of his research he discovered that many luxury brands are not managed properly and have a significant growth potential. He also developed new tools and strategies to analyze the potential of luxury segments, do congruent line extensions and manage luxury brands in a more profitable and sustainable fashion.

He developed a revolutionary tool, the "luxury index", that allows for the first time a numerical comparison between segments and brands and thus, manage luxury brands with an new level of precision. Among other tools and strategies, the "luxury index" is featured in his books Luxury Marketing & Management and Luxury Essentials, both co-authored with Prof. Dr. Oliver P. Heil (Ph.D.), which are published globally. Dr. Langer's research focuses on deepening our understanding of luxury. Importantly, the marketing of regular products can benefit substantially from luxury research findings in terms of identifying different and creative strategies enhancing innovativeness, competitiveness and profitability of fast moving consumer goods.

The book "Luxury Marketing & Management" is what many call "the gold standard" in luxury publications and has become a standard textbook on luxury and is used in Universities around the world. It will soon be published in Mandarin, Japanese and Korean. The book has the aim to take the understanding of the management of luxury to the next level. It is the right book for all those who want to gain a fundamental know-how on luxury, including background, definitions, scientific framework, management opportunities and pitfalls. The "Six L" of luxury provide a comprehensive set of strategies with many real-world cases to manage luxury brands with more precision and success. It also includes a vast number of hands-on examples. Consequently, "Luxury: Marketing & Management" has been endorsed and recommended by leading expert on luxury among those professors of global top universities (e.g. Stanford, Hong Kong, Paris) and CEOs of leading luxury companies, such as Rolls-Royce and Audemars Piguet. As an example, one of the world's leading luxury expert, Prof. Dr. Gilles Laurent from HEC Paris states: "This book provides a large coverage of research on luxury, combined with new practical approaches, such how to analyze the luxury potential of a category on the basis of the price differentials. Very enlightening reading for managers and consumers alike."

The new book, Luxury Essentials is targeted to a broader audience. This book provides truly new insights into the seemingly elusive concept of luxury and it does so using a compact and convenient format. More precisely, it condenses the authors' groundbreaking book "Luxury: Marketing & Management" into easy to digest pieces of knowledge, yet maintains the essence of the full-fledged original. Thus, the Essentials provide the best format for people on the go yet provide a comprehensive entry into this fascinating world of luxury with its most unique products, ideas and challenges for consumers, managers and also scientists. To those who want to go beyond the essentials and get additional inspiration by more background and more examples, the original textbook would seem to be a natural next step to read.

Dr. Langer presented his research and expertise on innovation, leadership and luxury management at several leading international research conferences and events, among others at MSI, London Business School, Thunderbird Global School of Business and University of Michigan's Ross School of Business.

He enjoys architecture, art, cycling, yoga and marathons. He lived and worked in Europe, USA and Japan and speaks several languages including German, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and Japanese.