With disparities in wealth greater than at any time since the Gilded Age, the gap is widening between the highly affluent — who find themselves behind the velvet ropes of today’s economy — and everyone else.Hey, this is just smart marketing, right? Maybe. In reality, your callow undergraduate classmate is getting a marketing degree or hotel management for this:
It represents a degree of economic and social stratification unseen in America since the days of Teddy Roosevelt, J. P. Morgan and the rigidly separated classes on the Titanic a century ago.
What is different today, though, is that companies have become much more adept at identifying their top customers and knowing which psychological buttons to push. The goal is to create extravagance and exclusivity for the select few, even if it stirs up resentment elsewhere. In fact, research has shown, a little envy can be good for the bottom line.
“We are living much more cloistered lives in terms of class,” said Thomas Sander, who directs a project on civic engagement at the Kennedy School at Harvard. “We are doing a much worse job of living out the egalitarian dream that has been our hallmark.”When the egalitarian dream seems like a fantasy, it's ok to ask, "what did these rich folk ever do for me to deserve getting Disneyland all to themselves?" Fair question, and one that should worry the top caste of our new money-based caste system much more than it does.
But let's ask (and try to answer) the cultural dynamic question first. To understand why this kind of marketing works for the wealthy, you have to understand what's at stake for them. Sure, they're extremely economically comfortable. They will be able to afford good schools for their children, probably allow them to avoid student debt, save more than enough for retirement, fully own their own home (perhaps more than one), buy a car for everyone, give their kids a wide range of experiences around the world, hire plenty help to allow them to pursue other productive activities, and unless they are extremely stupid with their finances (or unless the economy collapses around them due to their negligence) they should never have to face economic catastrophe. But why would they avoid contact with the lower castes?
The stakes for them aren't "economic catastrophe" the way the rest of us define it. Instead, the stakes are social catastrophe, as Thorsten Veblen described it in his Theory of the Leisure Class. Spending money to be in the company of fellow high-spenders signifies to everyone that you belong there, and that you're important enough to have a place at the table. And when you're important, your servants should already know what you want. According to the Times, this is the tricky part of marketing to the moneyed:
For companies trying to entice moneyed customers, that means identifying and anticipating what they want. “The premium customer doesn’t want to be asked questions,” said Mr. Clarke of PricewaterhouseCoopers. “They don’t want friction. They want things to happen through osmosis.”This gives the right hint to the primary reason that people desire to accumulate excess wealth, as well as the reason it's so scary for them to think about losing it: their money allows them to do a great deal with a very small amount of personal effort.
Even though this kind of pampering might be good for business, and delight those on the right side of the velvet rope, the gap between the privileged and the rest may ultimately leave everyone feeling uneasy, said Barry J. Nalebuff, a professor of management at Yale. “If I’m in the back of the plane, I want to hiss at the people in first class,” said Mr. Nalebuff, who has advised many Fortune 100 companies. “If I’m up front, I cringe as people walk by.”Deep inside, we all understand that there's something hard to justify about a money-based caste system. As a civilization, facing a low-GDP-growth future, we're only just getting good at talking about it openly.
No comments:
Post a Comment