During the recent RCS Academy event in Milan, after paying tribute to Giorgio Armani, Giuseppe Marsocci, CEO of the Armani Group, shared his reflections. Marsocci has been working for 20 years hand in hand with Mr. Armani. “The most important lesson I learned from him is his absolute coherence,” commented the manager.

“It is a coherence that started from his way of being and then became his way of creating, the way of managing the business, the way of carrying out the brand, of applying it to the various areas in which it then developed. It started from clothing, but it became much broader. There has always been a huge coherence, which he naturally passed on to us, to his collaborators, and which was our mantra,” he continued.

Armani’s approach has been strongly identitarian and has then become a lifestyle to the point that in universities they speak of the “Armani method” and is related to the way he managed his collaborators and his company. “Above all, his method was linked to not extremizing and to avoid any excess. As he used to say: ’It is better to remove than to add,’ even on the creative aspects. And it was also true for the business. We tended to maintain this criterion a lot.”

Marsocci somehow resembles Armani’s approach to life and work, coming from a city like Turin, where understatement is a trait of its inhabitants’ approach, and also his own. Plus because he spent 15 years in the US where he also brought that way to manage business.

“Also for me it seemed spontaneous to me to bring his language abroad–and I hope I have contributed to bring this identity idea, which I believe is our greatest strength,” he further explained.

“For Mr. Armani the identity of the brand was certainly a fundamental aspect, as the value of time. He never thought about the maximization of profit in the short term. Obviously we were helped by not being quoted in the stock market, but I could tell you tons of episodes in which every choice he made was thought in the long term, never in the maximization of the short term. For instance, in particular, in the last period, we made investments that even penalized the group’s marginality, but consciously–for this very now and then we checked with him if he was convinced of these choices.

In times as the recent ones when inflation increases, brands tend to increase prices a little bit more than necessary with a kind of excuse also of exclusivity. We made the completely opposite choice. So, we deliberately renounced some points of margin in the long term, for a sort of loyalty pact with the clients, which I think they noticed,” explained the manager.

Despite Mr. Armani took such decisions, he preferred to think in the long term as a fundamental feature of his way of working. “We have always worked for a long term creation. We have a lot of potential in our brand. In fact, someone accuses us of having inexpressible potential but in reality it has evolved because we made choices always thinking in the long term of loyalty to the clients of thinking about the brand more than the profit,” emphasizes Marsocci.

“Also the directions left by Mr. Armani in his last wills show he always lead a company that thinks in the long term, and similarly, his very precise indications show all eventual possibilities and how to take decisins in most precise cases in order that the new board knows how to behave–and we continue to follow this course.”

Along with the company’s continuity, the new board is also considering that some new decisions considering that market changes are happening. Referring to hotellerie and resort, a field where they have already invested by opening one Armani Hotel in Milan and one in Dubai and are getting significant results, they want to continue in the same direction, while keeping an eye on the evolution of the market. They refer to joint venture recently announced with Symphony Global, the company of Mohamed Alabbar, founder of Emaar Properties, in order to speed up this part of Armani’s business.

While asking Marsocci about the future destiny of the group and the much heard piece of news that the management has asked BCG to start looking for a partner acquiring 15% of the group, he hasn’t replied any further, but simply emphasized how they want to maintain their identity within the market’s evolution.