This week Echelon Marketing Group released a study about marketing luxury items. I haven’t had the chance to review their data in depth (so I don’t know the size of their sample or whom they were talking to), but on the surface they seem to have found several interesting things:
- Luxury marketers need to better understand whom they’re going after
Echelon President Don Neal:
âMarketers rely primarily on four categories of dataâdemographic, geographic, behavioral and attitudinalâhowever, luxury marketers not so much. To understand who can afford expensive products and the impact of money on their attitudes and behaviors, they also need to consider a fifth category based on economic insights.â
- Luxury marketers aren’t that great on focused consumer messaging; only half of luxury marketers engage in one-on-one luxury marketing (though 85% say they want to).
- Email is the least effective vehicle for presenting a luxury brand image. Direct mail, catalogs, telephone calls and special events involving consumers are more effective.
Neal:
âWhen invitations are sent to a select group to test drive cars during a special event, research shows six out of 10 of them wind up buying a car.â
These findings suggest that there’s a lot of room for luxury marketers to become more effective. A recent Jupiter report suggested that affluent people spend more time online—but perhaps the ‘cheapness’ of email and its association with unsolicited spam (or a deluge of work from the office) keeps it from being useful.
It’s all about real luxury experiences—when marketers can truly engage potential buyers with their products, their efforts translate into sales.
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