Tourism bets on non-inclusive marketing in the market – 12/06/2023 – Tourism

Luxury marketing is, it is known, one of the most thankless areas of this unfortunate discipline of applied social communication that is marketing. It’s because? Because with the objective of boosting sales by covering the fine boundaries of human desire, at the same time as establishing it as it is, marketing finds luxury to be a somewhat intractable product.

There is no way to increase sales of any product without making it accessible. This works for almost absolutely everything. In this process, the inevitable is to make advertising more and more a show for idiots who would be happy.

With luxury, things don’t work so well. One of the proofs is to start using terms like “premium”, “diamond”, “gold plus” or any synonym that, deep down, means some figure that makes you, for example, get on the plane first and, thus, have more space to place your three carry-on bags in the luggage racks above – whoever enters last gets the rest of the space and ends up having to check in their three carry-on bags. When the expression “premium” is used it is because luxury is less luxury.

One of the promises of behavioral marketing in the 21st century is to make you feel special and exclusive. The need for the promise is obvious because we live in a world that is becoming cheesy Disney at a fast pace. But let’s remember that the essential nature of luxury is to make those outside it feel excluded, someone “lesser” in the food chain.

Herein lies the structural contradiction of luxury marketing: at the same time as it needs to include consumers to sustain the business, it needs to maintain a huge fringe of excluded people who attest to the exclusivity of “those who are in luxury”. In other words, it’s about ensuring that the majority of people stay out of the VIP room.

In this sense, the travel, tourism and aviation market is a territory where capitalism’s vocation for barbecue on the roof becomes increasingly clear.

Certain “premium” products or spaces must be made accessible, otherwise the customer will not be happy because they are forced to feel like a second-class citizen or wander around the concentration areas of airports – this place that, as a friend of mine says, Marketing area, with all the ownership of those who understand the subject, will soon be one of the worst places for you to be photographed because traveling will be a sign that you are not in charge of your life.

Today, the strategy of companies in this market to increase sales is to create infinite internal differentiations to what was previously a luxury product, reducing the luxury character itself.

For example, VIP lounges, spaces that were previously only accessible to those traveling in business class or first class – which no longer exist in many airlines around the world – are now open to certain “colors” of your credit card.

The essential factor that has always made a luxury product what it is is its complete inaccessibility to mere mortals. Luxury, by definition, is not democratic, but the market has an uncontrollable vocation to be so, because this increases sales and retains customers who are happy to feel elevated into a supposedly chic category.

As incredible as it may seem to the uninitiated, the luxury market is struggling with capitalism’s vocation to transform the world into a rooftop barbecue. The question is how to guarantee spaces on this slab that the majority cannot enter.

One of the factors transforming airport VIP lounges into rooftop barbecues is banks and credit cards giving cardholders access to spaces that were previously exclusive to business and first class. The result is that it often ends up being less invasive to simply wander around the airport.

This is a structural condition of the market. There is no way out. The slab is the future of the world. Even though on that slab there is a fluid space, like everything nowadays, called “premium diamond”.