As a longtime marketing guy, I’m still fascinated by how easy it is to hoodwink people by making them think that a higher price equates to better quality.
The genius move, however, is to build on another perception of quality, e.g. “German engineering” or “French luxury” as a support for that higher price.
The “German engineering” ethos has been leveraged countless times, most notably with Mercedes cars — although in this case, it was a reputation very well earned, back in the 1960s and -70s. (In the recent past: not so much, as anyone who’s driven a Merc of said vintage will tell you.) As gunnies, we all know of the Heckler & Koch example, which has enabled this bunch of WWII-era retreads to make oodles of cash out of their not-especially noteworthy handguns and cheekbone-crushing G3/PTR-91 automatic rifles.
It’s why I always roll my eyes at the extreme HK fanbois, because I’m positive that most of their fanaticism stems from a need to justify their paying a premium price for what is really a pretty ordinary product.
As for “French luxury”, here’s one example of the trope: Grey Goose vodka, which is a case history for the ages. (Watch it; it’s 10 minutes of your time well spent.)
I happen to know quite a bit about vodka manufacturing, as it happens, having worked with the South African retail arm of Gilbey’s. As I’ve recounted on these pages before, part of my education occurred when the Gilbey’s guys took me on a tour of their production facility, where an engineer taught me how to make cheap liquor: take a clear distilled spirit (from any source: potatoes, sugar cane, barley, wheat, apples, all mixed together, whatever) and pass it through a series of charcoal filters to make vodka, or add a few drops of diesel fuel(!) to make gin, and so on.
The genius of marketing, in the Grey Goose example, was not the manufacture of the vodka or the quality of its raw material, therefore — French wheat is no different from any other wheat — but utilizing the aura of French luxury brands (Louis Vuitton, Chanel etc.) to imply that GG was an exceptional product, made all the more so by creating an artificial bottleneck on supply, and most telling of all, selling the product at a premium price to the International Status-Hungry Parvenu Set. Good grief: $30 per bottle for vodka? When it first came out, I tried it at a hotel bar somewhere — I think it was at Claridges in London, while on a business trip — and while I’m no expert on vodka, I have drunk a woeful amount of the foul stuff. I could discern little difference between Grey Goose, Stolichnaya and Smirnoff. (The bartender obliged me by setting up a blind taste test of the three brands — the mark of a good bartender, by the way.) I identified Smirnoff immediately (see above for reasons), but GG and Stoli? No chance. And Stolichnaya, by the way, is a product that trades on the Russian ethos for vodka quality, go figure.
But what all the above illustrates is how easy it can be to dupe people into buying expensive products as part of an aspirational desire to be part of a specific set — most notably, what used to be described as the “jet set” (now, the private jet set), which contains elements of society such as professional footballers, pop stars, supermodels, Russian oligarchs, Hollywood actors, software billionaires and other such scum.
And never has the old adage been so verified that a fool and his money are soon parted.
