The business of making memories
Why do we even consider premium and luxury to be different categories?
Before I start this essay, I’d like you to take a sheet of paper and write down a list of your five happiest memories.
Take all the time you need for this. The more you remember the way you felt when you experienced those happy memories, the more my point will make sense to you. I say this because humans are quite forgetful. If I asked you for your top five movies, chances are you’d miss some of your favourites, simply because, well, people forget...
Some time ago, I started a lecture on luxury at McCann Erickson asking everyone in the lecture room to do this. Then, we pulled out a few participants’ notes out of a hat, and collectively tried to put a price on the experiences.
The results were quite surprising to all: almost none of the happiest memories were expensive, or even had anything to do with money. Some did come as a long-awaited reward after a period of sacrifice—one of them was winning an olympic medal—so you could say there was a personal price paid there... But mostly the experiences people counted as the happiest memories in their life were free of any kind of commercial transaction.
Why do I focus on this? Because one way to think about the difference between premium brands and luxury brands is that money doesn’t play a role in luxury brands.
That is, premium brands tend to justify the money you pay for their products with very specific benefits. You’ll pay more for this version of the Audi A8 because it comes with leather seats. You’ll pay more for this plane seat because you get 30cm extra space for your legs. That kind of thing.
Luxury brands, on the other hand, don’t go for that kind of measure at all. Nothing specific about the product correlates with the price you’re paying, in the same way that nothing specific about a painting by Picasso correlates with the price you’re paying. It’s just, well, the price you’re paying to satisfy your desire for something deeply subjective, and therefore incomparable to something else.
We’ve spoken in previous essays about the absurdity of putting a Robert Parker-style rating of, say, 93 to Picasso’s Guernica and 94 to Van Gogh’s Sunflowers. Luxury’s position is that these numbered ratings are just as absurd for everything from wine to jewellery. In other words: it’s not just better, it’s incomparable. That’s why you want it.
So, then, what can brand directors learn from luxury brands?
Well, it’s simple, really: cultivating the incomparable is the very purpose of branding.
I tend to work with this mindset even when I’m working with clients who don’t operate in the luxury sector. Because, once you work from this premise, it’s not just that price is irrelevant for people who don’t care about prices (i.e. the traditional, expensive luxury brands) but for everyone else, too. A swim in an Austrian lake that cost exactly €0 ends up being on of the most luxurious moment in your life.
Your brand doesn’t have to be unique in absolute to get there, but it does have to be the salient option for a specific set of people. The moment you take away the argument that this particular hotel, for example, is the right one for you, you might as well start a price war on booking.com
Now, you have to be careful here, because you might just want to ask yourself if the intangible values you’ve been cultivating are really ownable. Over the last decade or so, we’ve seen hundreds of new brands building their proposition on intangible values. Dozens of brands riding the latest waves of eco-this, or fairtrade-that, or craft-this, or small batch-that. So, intangible values in and of themselves are far from making your product unique or incomparable if they’re clichés.
Think of clichés as a form of commodity. An intellectual commodity. So, a watch made by a Swiss company that talks about, say, heritage and attention to detail is on its way to becoming a commodity if it is indistinguishable from the hundred other Swiss companies talking about heritage and attention to detail. Another grain of rice in a bucket of rice, a.k.a. boring.
So, what to do?
Well, one thing to do is to consider the ways in which someone might just completely love the experience of having your product in their life.
But it’s tricky. You see, to get into the right mindset about how that can even happen, you have to give up on anything that’s measurable. In fact, you probably should suspend the part of your brain that has anything to do with measurability or logic. Which sounds nuts, of course, but once you get into this mindset, you’ll start noticing that companies spend huge amounts of money on things that may be amazing feats of measurable performance, but that nobody is particularly impressed with.
For example, most people who love EuroDisney would probably prefer their rides to last longer. But they would probably prefer the ride on the Eurostar that takes them to EuroDisney to be shorter.
So, if you were the CEO at Eurostar, the measurable and logical approach would be to spend lots and lots of money to get your rides to be shorter. You could easily spend billions doing that.
The alternative I’m talking about would be to get away from these easy (but expensive) solutions, and ask yourself why people want EuroDisney rides to be longer and Eurostar rides to be shorter. And the simple answer to that is that EuroDisney rides are great fun, whereas Eurostar rides are not. So that the successful course of action might not be to spend billions making Eurostar rides shorter, but to make them as fun as the rides at EuroDisney.
What might something like this look like? Well, that’s going to be subjective, but one really good starting point would be to stop thinking of yourself as being in the business of running a train company, but rather as being in the business of making memories.