Until recently, I thought Snapchat was an app used primarily by tweens and teenagers to send each other silly pictures. No longer. This week, I interviewed Frederic Cumenal, chief executive of Tiffany & Co, at a Financial Times luxury summit in San Francisco.

During our conversation, Cumenal revealed that Tiffany had recently created a sparkly Snapchat “filter” that communicates the dazzle of a diamond to anyone with a mobile phone. It even allows would-be purchasers to virtually “try on” the rings, without ever needing to go into one of those reverentially hushed Tiffany stores.

Is this a good idea? That is the big question — actually, the $222bn question, if we go by the sector’s annual sales — hanging over the luxury goods world today. One of the reasons companies such as Tiffany are creating Snapchat filters is that they are keen to catch the cyber buzz — and appeal to “millennials”.

Another factor is that the luxury sector is under pressure to do something — anything — to persuade sceptical investors that it can continue to grow, because, right now, it seems to be at an inflection point. In the decade leading up to the financial crisis of 2007-08, rich consumers in the west gobbled up luxury goods amid the credit boom. Then, when the slowdown hit, cash-rich consumers in places such as China, Russia and Brazil jumped in to provide a new source of demand.

Now those emerging market countries are in the doldrums, and an anti-corruption drive in China has halted jewellery sales. Meanwhile, demand in Europe remains weak, and even in the US, which is supposed to be recovering, the picture is far from buoyant. Little wonder, then, that the share price of Tiffany (like many luxury goods companies) has tumbled by almost one-third in the past year.

People such as Cumenal argue that this partly reflects the vagaries of the business cycle. But what is really interesting for sociologists and anthropologists — albeit more worrying for those luxury executives — is that consumer habits in the west could be undergoing an even bigger structural change. In the 20th century, it was taken for granted that when rich people wanted to “enjoy” their wealth and display status, they acquired expensive goods such as houses, cars, art — and diamonds. But according to Sarah Quinlan, a MasterCard executive who analyses vast reams of spending data each month, there has recently been a shift in terms of how wealthy and not-so-wealthy people are spending money.

These days, overall consumer spending is growing (albeit more among the rich than the poor). This growth is occurring almost entirely in services such as restaurants, hotels, travel and holidays, not just in the middle market but in the luxury sector too. “One thing that comes out of these great recessions is that we like our friends and families again — we prize spending time with them,” Quinlan says. “The majority of [the growth] in spending is going to travel and leisure, not goods.” Or, as a report by Deloitte consultants notes: “All consumers, but especially millennials, value experiences . . . spend by people travelling accounts for 40 per cent of the personal luxury markets.”

According to Quinlan, this shift can be explained by changes in lifestyles and values: today’s millennials often live in cities, not suburbs, so have less physical space in which to store “stuff”; they also prize concepts such as “sustainability” and “community”.

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I suspect there is another factor too: in the cyber age, physical goods simply do not feel very “exclusive” any more. Think once again about those diamonds. Fifty years ago, a scruffy teenager couldn’t wander into a jewellery store and try on a diamond ring; indeed, 100 years ago, poor people barely knew what the rich were wearing. But the internet has democratised the view: anyone can now “see” luxury goods and buy them online.

What remains more exclusive are “experiences”, precisely because these cannot be commoditised online. One of the most powerful forms of conspicuous consumption today is not the accumulation of goods but the accumulation of memories — and stories. These are precious because they cannot be replicated.

That does not mean that people will stop buying diamonds. But it does mean that luxury goods companies are being advised to mix experiences with goods to create prestige. Don’t just put diamonds on Snapchat; offer rich clients the chance to meet the master craftsman too.

To put it another way, the more that our lives are hijacked by robots and cyber links, the more valuable the individual — human — touch starts to become. It is a striking reminder of just how arbitrary our ideas of “value” — and luxury — really are. And perhaps a reason for cheer.