Business of Luxury Part 8: Services as Luxury Products

If you think of the 24 hours in the day as an “Experience Space” that is made up by a number of discrete experiences, large and small, you start getting a feel for why luxury customers increasingly will turn to services as a way to fill more of their day with luxurious experiences.

You can almost define products like watches, fashion, handbags, mobile phones and jewelry as background or environmental experiences. They help define the person but beyond the “Personal Positioning” they don’t fill out the Experience Space. The environment within which a person exists helps provide a context for the Experience Space, but the things a person does fills up the space.

Consequently, if my thesis holds that luxury customers want to increasingly immerse themselves in luxury experiences during the day, services is the next luxury growth segment. Now remember that I think of luxury as a micro segmented experience, not necessarily as something that has to do with the amount of money spent consuming the luxury good or service. Luxury has to do with Personal Positioning, and the drivers here are uniqueness, rarity, a person’s dreams and self image rather than simply flashing wealth or class.

So how will people fill in their 24-hours-a-day Experience Space and increase the quality of this time? I believe tomorrow’s marketer needs to analyze not only the demographics but increasingly the psychographics of their customers. Primarily they need to map out the lives of their increasingly micro segmented audience and really understand how the Experience Space of the audience can be enhanced.