Before hiring a marketing professional you must correctly identify your companies place in the market.

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Before hiring a marketing professional you must correctly identify your companies place in the market.

Before hiring a marketing professional you must correctly identify your companies place in the market. You need to do this, because sadly, many marketing professional do not even know the difference.

There are very few true Luxury marketers. Almost all marketing degrees are in mass marketing.
I started to study it independently when I was in school getting a
double major in marketing & finance and a minor in advertising. I took a school work internship with a
company that syndicated thoroughbred race horses. My thesis was on what motivates the rich to purchases;
the mind set of the ultra high net worth and what motivates them to buy. Most wealth in America is relatively new money and
they did not get it by being stupid, so why did they purchase race horses which
are technically a very poor financial investment. I met with great success and my project lead
to a whole new and successful marketing strategy for the company. My professors were thrilled with this
undeveloped aspect of marketing. I was
the only one doing it and my natural interest in this topic spurred me on to
continue to study and develop ways to reach the uber wealthy and I was amazed
at how it was often counter to all the things that were taught in traditional
mass marketing. Now, large prestigious Universities
like HEC offer MBAs specifically in Luxury Marketing.

What I find most amazing today is that even most marketers do not understand that there is a very different way to market to the wealthy.
I am not talking upper middle class or even lower upper class. I am talking about those whose life style
includes multiple private jets, yachts, multiple multi million dollar homes,
cars, etc.,. I am talking about the
already arrived, not the striving to be.
I see articles by marketers claiming to be luxury marketers and
they speak of brands like Talbot’s, Pottery Barn, iPhone, Baccardi rum, Master
card, and other mass blue chip brands as luxury. Just because a website or an advertisement prints
the word “luxury”, it does not make it so.
The vast majority of the time I see the word luxury it is misused which
is the ploy to confuse the masses into thinking they are getting something more
than they are.

There are websites and magazines which would make you think it is for the wealthy by including the word luxury. If you see
words like “discount”, “bargain”, “luxury for cheap”, or “Sale”, you can be sure that you are on a site
targeting the masses that need to bargain hunt and clip coupons. These words
would actually be an immediate turn off to the true luxury consumer. Any luxury
marketer knows that it is better to eat any inventory than to put it on sale. If a product is made in large quantities and
has a vast distribution like Coke, Nike or Apple Computer, you know it is by
definition a mass product. All of these
would be considered blue chip companies, but definitely not luxury companies.

When I see true luxury brands hiring senior marketing executives from blue chip companies, I know that there will be a dip in that brand.
In tough financial environments they will do stupid things by not
staying true to their core luxury brand and respond like a mass product. Image takes a long time to build and can be destroyed
in an instant. These elite brands spend
hundreds of millions of dollars for the intangible brand value and just one
foolish mass marketing approach by an untrained marketing professional can bring
it tumbling down.

By Lorre White

"The Luxury Guru"

White Light Consulting

"Those who say it can't be done...need to get out of the way of those who are doing it!"

www.LuxGuru.Typepad.com Luxury Blog