Bank of America has published its latest ranking of luxury brand strength, and the results are worth reading closely, mostly because of what the ranking actually measures.
The bank's Brand Leading Indicator for the second quarter of 2026 puts Prada first among soft-luxury brands, Michael Kors second and Alaia third, according to the note as reported. For June specifically the top three were Chanel, Alaia and Coach. Gucci improved 20 places to sixth, Louis Vuitton climbed to tenth from twenty-eighth, and Loro Piana returned to the top ten in seventh. Swatch led the separate hard-luxury category.
What the indicator is measuring
Before drawing conclusions, it is worth being precise about the method. This is a sell-side research note, meaning a bank's own analysts publishing a view for clients, not an independent audit of brand health.
The indicator covers 43 soft-luxury brands and is built from social media followers, online searches and website traffic, with momentum weighted at 60 percent and overall digital presence at the remaining 40 percent.
That is a measure of attention. It captures which brands people are currently looking at, searching for and talking about. It does not directly measure revenue, margin, average selling price or how much a brand can charge before customers walk away. The momentum weighting in particular rewards brands whose digital footprint is growing quickly, which favors names coming from a lower base.
This explains results that would otherwise look strange next to the sector's financial league table. Michael Kors placing second, or Louis Vuitton climbing eighteen places in a quarter, tells you about the trajectory of online attention, not about the relative size or profitability of the businesses.
Attention and pricing power are different things
The commercial definition of brand strength in luxury is narrower and harder: the ability to raise prices without losing customers.
That distinction matters more than usual right now, because the industry spent the post-pandemic years leaning heavily on price. Much of the sector's growth in that period came from charging more rather than selling more units, a strategy that works until customers decide the price no longer matches the product. The subsequent slowdown, concentrated in aspirational buyers rather than the very wealthy, is what the industry has been working through.
Attention data is genuinely useful against that backdrop, since online engagement does precede a great deal of luxury spending, and a brand losing search interest is rarely about to raise prices successfully. But the two can diverge for long stretches. A brand can be widely discussed while discounting heavily, and a brand can be quietly disciplined about distribution, largely absent from social feeds, and command full price in every store.
The China signal underneath
The most consequential number in the note may be the one that runs against the headline.
BofA reported that digital engagement across soft luxury rose 18 percent year over year, a fifth consecutive quarter of acceleration, with Google searches up 47 percent and website traffic up 39 percent. Set against that, the note flagged an 18 percent decline in searches on Baidu, the dominant Chinese search engine.
China has been the swing factor for global luxury for a decade, and the sector's recovery hinges substantially on Chinese demand returning. An improvement in Western engagement alongside a fall in Chinese search interest is a mixed signal, not a clean recovery, and it is consistent with the pattern of the past two years, in which luxury demand in the US has held up better than in mainland China. The note pointed to continued recovery led by the US and South Korea.
How to use a note like this
Sell-side brand trackers are best treated as one input among several rather than a verdict. They are timely, updated quarterly and built on data that is observable in near real time, which conventional financial reporting is not. Company results arrive months after the quarter they describe; search volumes arrive immediately.
The failure mode is reading a ranking of attention as a ranking of business quality, or worse, as a stock recommendation. It is neither. What the note supports is a narrower claim: that consumer interest in soft luxury has been accelerating for five straight quarters in Western markets, that Prada and a handful of others are capturing a disproportionate share of that interest, and that China has not yet joined in.
