A Singaporean's love letter to 'Luxury'

Dear Luxury,

Your exclusivity is being traded for profits.

Earlier, you stood as a reining prom queen with a select set of powerful minions swearing by you but today you have the masses having access to seek your obeisance. While everyone can touch and feel you, it makes you feel torn from what you stood for in your golden days.

Standing in the bright sunshine, you are more powerful than ever before but you crave to go back in time when you ruled the midnight parties and jealous whispers among your private people.

Alas! The fact remains that your favorite friend - the iPhone - is going to introduce its cheaper cousin for the emerging economies.  Other designer friends have done this too for those high-street labels. The reality (called dollars) lies in the masses and you has no other choice but knock the Asian gates.

After all, that ugly Betty of middle-class is earning well (and saving beyond her means) to an affluence level that matches your price tag. It's so hard for you to ignore the new politics of luxury economy. Still, in your dreams, you secretly wish for maintaining your exclusivity while reaping the new crops from the masses.

Couple of weeks back, you must have gotten some respite from that article in the New York Times. Making the case for cheaper iPhone while maintaining a sense of exclusivity - it hinted you on keeping it aspirational. Quoting Tim Cook, it justified the cheaper iPhone strategy by costing it out a little pricier than the androids of the world.

While it may look like a potent strategy that balances the best of both the worlds, the chasm of aspiration lies in that extra $100 ($199 for usual iPhone, $99 for the cheaper one vs. $0 for an android phone - on contract). The masses may or may not cross it. The leap will definitely determine if your dreams of ‘controlled exclusivity’ come true.

So, what’s the value of those extra 100 bucks? To a rational price-sensitive consumer, it’s good enough to think twice before getting a new (cheaper) iPhone but it doesn’t really matter for the societally conscious. Poverty is such a bad stigma that 100 bucks seems like a no price when it’s about warding off the notion of being poor.

The feeling is heightened when you live in a rich society and people look at you with those condescending eyes. Bottom line: While you may ward off the majority of sensible price-sensitive and educated middle-class you end up attracting followers from the lower economic strata. Thus, confirming your worst nightmare and ending up with two very different set of followers – the elite and the blue collars.

Who comes to your rescue when your strategy of keeping it aspirational, while minting some money, backfires? Yes, it’s your fanatic consumers (the elite) who form the core of who you are.

Evolution is a funny thing. It springs up various traits that were never imagined. Your consumers are no different. Often used to checking each other out, they have acquired a trait called “the Aura of Luxury”. It is a combination of various luxury possessions that make up the aura of someone’s exclusivity. It is about pairing up a Chanel with a Jimmy Choo and carrying an iPhone with a gold-plated exterior.

The motivation behind this trait lies in the propensity of preserving that self-worth (acquired from possessing a luxury brand) so badly that it makes them adopt new ways to maintain their existence. It happens through the gleaning movements from the corner of their eyes.

They tend to look beyond the phone and stop at the nearest thing that makes them a 'better' person than that undeserving possessor of luxury. The laze of their gaze and the haze of their exclusive mind make them do this.

So what if iPhone becomes the omnipresent God. Just an iPhone won't really do because the next item on the observer's trajectory is that cheap watch that shouts out the status of the undeserving only to confirm the motivated reasoning of your exclusive customers.

These judgments are made instantly and person’s value drops lower than what he could have potentially secured. Even if that iPhone is paired with a good watch, the nasty eyes will move to the bag only to wait for the brand mismatch.

Clothes, belts, shoes are other milestones toward this journey of exclusivity. It will take a decade for that blue-collar worker to adorn all things luxury. Possibly till then, your core customers would have moved to newer metaphors from your brand.

(Human) Nature takes its own course and you customers have evolved to perceive exclusivity as a state of mind than ability to afford. For that reason, my love, don’t worry and go ahead with that cheaper iPhone only to make an extra billion.

Watching it all from the corner of my eyes,

Your Secret Admirer