The Myth And Realities Of Luxury Marketing

Sunday, September 14, 2014

The Myth And Realities Of Luxury Marketing

In a former life, your humble author had a bit of money and liked to buy some expensive cars. Most particularly, I chose the ownership of two Phaetons over one Flying Spur about eight years ago. This bit of contrarian behavior happened after I had a long discussion with my local Bentley dealer. As a consequence, I'm still on the mailing list. Since Bentley is in the business of selling $80,000 Volkswagens for $180,000, they have the kind of profit margin that lets "mailing list" refer to a bunch of people getting Patrick Bateman-quality creamy bond paper mail instead of anonymous HTML spam. So what do we have here? Are you interested? I kind of was, so I opened it.

This is what brilliant marketing looks like. It's long since been proven that advertisements are effective because they are aspirational or confirmatory, not because they contain useful information or competitive comparisons or anything you'd see in a typical Pontiac ad of the Eighties. Advertising shows us who we'd like to be, or it confirms the brilliance of our existing choices and makes us more likely to purchase again.

To quote one of my favorite authors and one of my favorite articles by that author:

The target demo is not the 1%; the target demo is the Aspirational 14%. They know they are supposed to like quality and goodness and etiquette and discretion, but no one ever taught them what those things look like, so when someone does point it out to them they will go all in. Hence: anything in Trading Up. And they don't care about the next generation. Not really. They don't want them to be eaten by zombies but anything past 2069 is of no consequence. What they do care about is how a product brands them, what it says about them now, now that time is running out. Can't afford to be subtle, which is the same thing as saying I'm willing to pay… to get the message across. There's a difference between what the brand is and what the brand says about you. You'll pay 10x for the former and 100x for the latter.

While the Continental GT is cheap by the standards of Goldman Sachs bonus babies, it's cheap to no one else and it's exceptionally difficult to "stretch" your way into a CGT because the cheapest lease I was ever quoted for a Continental GT of my very own was about $2300/month with all the right options. $2300/month in the tax bracket where you can afford it is really $5000/month of pre-tax money which means that by the time you insure and fuel the car you're spending $80,000 a year of pre-tax income on a car in a country where the average family has half of that much money on which to live, eat, and purchase healthcare.

So how do you pitch aspirational to people who have that kind of money to throw around? Typically it's done by putting the CGT next to something that costs even more, like an $8000/hour executive jet or the kind of home that retails for $25 million anywhere but a McMansion lot in Texas or the Midwest. But there's another way and The Last Psychiatrist nails it:

The man in the photo is not a representation of the target demo; he is the impossible aspiration of the target demo.

What's impossible for the kind of people who can afford this car? Why, it's the one thing that's impossible for anyone to buy: youth. Of course the woman is young, but she's not that young. She's not the SeekingArrangement girl who's charging five hundred bucks for an hour with one of her sorority sisters' fathers or the Vegas career prostitute you'd see on the arm of a Russian mobster or NBA owner. She's the thirty-four-year-old gorgeous mother who married our water-logged hero three months after she graduated from Vassar and he graduated from Dartmouth. (And ignore the British registration; that's just so they can remind you it's a British car.)

These are beautiful, successful young people who were born to money and achieved distinction on their own. They're still sexy, still spontaneous, still enviable. I can assure you with 100% certainty that their real-life versions do not own a Continental GT. They have some sort of malevolent-looking GL or Range Rover or Yukon Denali, depending on geographical location — if, that is, they even own a car at all.

The average Continental GT buyer is fiftysomething and is interested in showing off a bit. Most of the people I met while hanging out at Bentley dealer events were self-made types. Most weren't very good-looking or put-together because when you build and run the kind of business that gets you that kind of income in one generation, your hands don't stay idle and you don't spend much time looking after your looks. You have money. What you want is excitement, sex, the thrill of youth. Could you have some of it in a Continental GT? Of course not. But if you want to kid yourself about it…