Courting The Best Customer
(Courting: trying to win somebody’s love or favor as in ‘the courtiers’ of a royal court.)
Greg Furman
Founder and Chairman
The Luxury Marketing Council
In this dispiriting recession, the “best customer” –those with liquid portfolios of $1million or more– are kings and queens who must be ‘courted’ as never before.
They are quite aggressively causing luxury brands to rethink their approach to every facet of the marketing mix.
These ‘best customers’ demand high-touch, sophistication, intimacy, and intelligent, personalized communications. Their loyalty is no longer correlated to brand alone but to the quality of service and product and the way that service and product are delivered. The are ‘ad cynical’, skeptical of ‘push’ strategies, but open more to ‘pull’ strategies: what friends say; what they see on blogs and through social networking online; special, bespoke and intimate events
The convergence of television, phone, computer, camera, fax, web, etc. are revolutionizing the way the ‘new’ luxury consumer’ will be influenced to buy.
Luxury marketing is rapidly moving away from the old corporate PUSH model
–CREATE DESIRE to LISTEN, and, HAVING HEARD, CREATE NEW VALUE-ADD SERVICES AND PRODUCTS.
THE LUXURY CUSTOMER IS NOW FIRMLY IN CHARGE.
This ‘recession’ is a call to action for luxury brands to become more creative, to assemble communities, share best practices and win by redefining the entire marketing proposition based on what customers say it should be.
A call to action to leverage the community of kindred-spirit luxury brands is only heard by those who see ‘downturn/tough times’ as a time of opportunity, not by those who see the limitations of old-world, single-brand marketing, but for those who see the power of community as THE way to learn faster and market more cost-effectively, intelligently and profitably together.
In short, to surprise and delight the best customer by COURTING them like the kings and queens they are.
June 16, 2009
