Premium Positioning

Luxury, exclusive, expensive brands are all about status. The desire for status, for ‘social-standing’, is one of the most powerful drivers of human behavior that there is, and billions upon billions of dollars have been made by providing wealthy consumers with the means to demonstrate their status to the world around them – because of course status ceases to be relevant the moment that you are marooned alone upon a desert island a la Tom Hanks.

 

When you are attempting to get people to pay way above and beyond a ‘normal’ price for a particular product or service (in this case, banking), what you are actually attempting to do is create a perceived sense of social meaning around said product or service – if I drive/drink/wear/bank with X, it means Y – with Y generally meaning ‘I’ve got loads of money so you had better bow down.’

What is very interesting about creating a premium perception around a brand is that the key issue is not so much to create said perception within the minds of the purchaser as it is to create it within the minds of all those who cannot afford to purchase it. The definition and attraction of exclusivity is exclusion (sorry for stating the obvious). I will not therefore be attracted to and see premium value in a brand that the vast majority of my fellow human beings do not know and understand that they are excluded from buying/accessing.

Therefore the point I am making is that when advertising a premium brand the audience is not the purchaser, it’s the wannabe purchasers, because it is only the existence of wannabe purchasers that gives the brand the cachet necessary to make it attractive to the actual potential purchasers – essentially they will only buy it if it makes the rest of the world feel envious.

Thus the job of ads like this is to create a sense of envy in the wider public, or as we like to spin it in advertising, to make the brand aspirational.

Now making a brand aspirational is very tricky. It’s all about building a set of associations around that brand that paint a picture in the collective mind about the material things that signify success and achievement in a particular society. In many ways advertising is one of the most powerful forces of modern life with regard to creating and codifying the commonly accepted symbols of success. Huge amounts of ink have been poured to hammer home the point that a Gucci suit, Jimmi Choo shoes, D&G bag, CLS coupe and a Rolex watch (or a full wine cellar in the case of this ad) are the ultimate symbols of a man/woman who has made it in life.

These symbols are very culturally specific. Contrast the above list with a similar list that could be drawn up for the people of Maasailand – wives and cows, not necessarily in that order. A wine cellar for a Barclays Premier branch in Narok really wouldn’t cut much ice… different cultures and different communities within cultures have different ways of displaying and communicating their wealth – on the sub-continent they like to wear it in the form of gold, in West Africa/East LA they like to wear it around their necks in the form of flashy stones, in parts of Britain they like to demonstrate it by the very ancientness of their furniture, and so on. Personally, being of the Mt. Kenya persuasion, I would love to be able to show you that I’m the man by taking you on a five hour drive around my shamba, but unfortunately right now it would be more like a 50 second stroll.

Therefore the question that I ask about this ad is whether the symbolism is effective in this market. Wine cellars are a very Western (Europe, not Luhyaland) thing. I know that the young and upwardly mobile of this town are on a bit of a mission to out-western the West (Blankets and Wine anyone?), but I do wonder just how far this Art Café/Twitter/holidays-in-Cape Town mentality has seeped down into the wider Kenyan consciousness. If you take my point that you have to create envy amongst the general public, then you need to use associated symbols which are relevant to the general public, which I don’t think a wine cellar is.

Furthermore, how young is ‘real’ money in this town? Exactly who is this brand targeted at? Truth be told Barclays is actually something of a Mzee’s bank – at it’s heart as a retail bank are Kenyans who started making money in the 60’s and 70’s, and who are therefore now in their 60’s and 70’s. If the objective is to migrate these guys to a higher value service, a wine cellar will most certainly not cut it – I refer you back to my comment about the symbolic value of land in the wider African consciousness.

If the objective however is to try and tap into the emerging ‘I earn a million plus and I’d never be seen dead in the village young-ish corporate elite’ then I guess a wine cellar is a bit closer to the mark, but it is still a rather personal symbol of success, whilst we are still a society that is all about the public display of wealth, which is why we drive cars that cost more than our houses…

I know that it sounds a bit like I’m nit-picking, but the creation of successful luxury brands for the domestic market is something that we as an industry in Kenya have largely failed to achieve. We’re great at flogging 5 shilling sachets of margarine to the bottom of the pyramid but we haven’t yet cracked the secret of getting our fellow Nairobians to spend big money on something home made…

Thus the challenge we face is to start to create our own symbols of success – what are they? What do they look like? How do they talk? What do they wear? How do they smell? How do they feel? Where are they from, and so on... until we do so we shall remain beholden to a symbolism that is just as imported as the luxury brands it represents.