The Myth of Luxury

I have not been blogging for a while as I have been working on a new book I am co-writing with Ross Honeywill of the Social Intelligence Lab about the importance of understanding the NEO and Traditional typology in the modern business environment. It is often said that everyone has a book inside of them, which if is true for me, it is definitely stuck in there and finding it hard to work its way out! Thankfully I have Ross to do all the hard work that I can talk credit for at a later stage.

I have just returned from speaking at the Ragatz Fractional Conference in San Francisco and I have to say it was a strange experience. Speaker after speaker was repeating the mantra of demographics (there's lots of people in the world) and wealth (some of them have money). It was a little like watching the band playing on the Titanic - nice to a point but not exactly relevant to the situation at hand.

What has evoled for us over recent months is that it has become clear that it is absolutely vital for people to rethink and understand who their audience is and NOT under any circumstances get stuck in the middle between NEOs and Traditionals. Apple is making a fortune out of hitting almost every NEO touchpoint will effortless skill, and Wal-Mart isn't doing too badly driving home the value message to the millions of Traditionals out there. What you don't want to be is not as beautiful or unique as the Apple of your particular industry, nor do you want to be priced higher than the Wal-Mart of your sector either. The middle is the worse place to be.

This brings me on to the subject of luxury. Thanks to the very nice people at Calistoga Ranch I was driving an S-Class Mercedes last week and it got me thinking. When I was a kid and my dad had one of the worst cars on the road, a Vauxhall Viva (simply dreadful) I remember getting a lift in my friends dad's Mercedes. It wasn't just a different car, it was a different world. The seats were made of dead cow as opposed to my dad's vinyl ones, the windows rolled down at the press of a button rather than a sticky handle and the stereo, now we are talking. My dad's car had a radio and this being late 1970's England it had about 4 stations on it, all of them bad. My friend's dad's Mercedes had a a stereo with lots of speakers. I distinctly remember thinking that David Bowie must have been sitting in the back seat so good did Star Man sound, but then Rod Stewart must have been hidden in the trunk. Never has Maggie May sounded so good.

Why does this matter? Well the modern S-Class was very "nice" but it wasn't really that different from lots of other cars. Pretty much any car these days comes with pretty much everything that used to make the luxury cars, well luxury. The differences are now incremental; a slightly better stereo, cooled seats in the back for nobody to sit on, a nasty little noise that told me someone was in my blind spot to save me the draconian step of having to look over my own shoulder while over taking. Not exactly David Bowie and Rod Stewart are they?

Then I realized. With so much of the emphasis upon selling us luxury in almost every element of our lives, what most people seem to have not realized is that we already have it. Granite counter tops, rain showers and wood floors in our houses, music at our fingertips, foods from around the world and access to pretty much anything we want whenever we want. It doesn't mean that luxury isn't still desirable, it just tends to be incremental, like the S Class. That makes it far less valuable than it used to be.

S0 what is valuable? Valuable is something I don't have; something that makes my life immeasurably easier, more beautiful and more memorable. Valuable is design that excites, technology that frees and experiences that linger in your mind and you want to share. These are worth paying for, whatever they cost.

Learning the difference may well be the difference between prosperity or joining the whistling with the band on the Titanic.