A Wren Says

Maybe to you, the idea of spending money on a handbag is laughable, downright egregious. You have no desire for luxury purses, but you couldn’t afford it right now anyway. You just get what you like, so long as it’s within your means

In this series on luxury consumers, I’ve gone through this list of four luxury consumer types:

1. Patrician
2. Parvenu
3. Poseur

And now we come to the antiluxury consumer: The Proletariat.

In the four studies that made up the paper, Han and colleagues seemed to treat the proletariat as an afterthought. They were there in the background, while other groups vied for status. And you might think that because this group doesn’t buy luxury, marketers should ignore them. You’d be wrong.

Because the other groups might seek to distance themselves from a person low economic means. They need to be more aware of luxury products, not for their own sake. No, this is so that other groups need their community to know how special their bag is. If the people you choose to distance yourself from, have no idea how fancy your bag is, how are you going to gloat?

This implication from the authors is changing how I view marketing and the purpose of building awareness. It’s a lot more intricate than I once thought.

My series on the luxury consumer types is over. Did you learn anything new?