Luxury isn’t a straight-line correlation

By Bennett,  Marketing & Brand Head

Building affinity in luxury real estate is a series of carefully punctuated experiences at specific intermittent levels

LUXURY AND THE UNEQUIVOCAL OWNERSHIP OF AN ATTRIBUTE

The starting point is that most luxury brands have acquired a pre-determined set of associations that draws one irreversibly in favour of that brand amidst other competing brands that also own and occupy an equally powerful set of associations.While there is always one singular attribute that resonates powerfully and owned unequivocally,moving the need to own, how does A brand acquire more meaning more versus another?

The need to buy into luxury is more often than notthe status associated, the badge value. Essentially, the desire to fit-n or the desire to stand-out.More like the ‘HALO’ of ‘Distinctive Individuality’. The intangible value of a Brand is of critical importance in the luxury space irrespective of category. The brand justifies the quantum invested. Therefore, the set of associations that the brand wraps itself with becomes severely important. So, what happens when the brand is unknown or the brand is not known by luxury associations?

The moot point being that when the brand name doesn’t play a role in the influencing of the purchase decision, what does a luxury real estate brand need to do to usurp the sort of pride and need that the customer will yield to?

DEEP IMMERSIVE UNEARTHING

When investing a hundred million rupees on luxury real estate, this is an absolutely carefully weighed rational decision made right? WRONG…This more often than not an emotional decision that is taken after the resurrection of several layers of deep-seated subliminal desires raised to the fore which find a heightened need for fulfilment.

The need for deeply immersive and experiential marketing in luxury real estate marketing cannot be stated further and is akin to the unravelling phenomenon when one peels away every concentric layer of an onion. It is about taking the essence of a brand and amplifying it into a set of in-depth, deeply immersive, meaningful and purposeful experiences in order to suffuse the consumer’s decision-making process while layering positive disposition and firming the need to own along the path-to-purchase. But the absolute truth is that a large number of marketing professionals fail to maximize the real potential of developing an effective experiential marketing strategy.

Unfortunately, there is so much reliance on creating demand and the rest of the fructification process to sale, that the necessary set of brand interspersing is found to be needless investment of time, effort and resource and is consequently abandoned. The breaking down of every single nuance without sacrificing any part of the essence of the brand is of particular significance in luxury real estate where the associations to luxury and its value are not always understood. The valuation of a brand and the value one ascribes to luxury in real estate is better done by literally communicating each of the hundred stories in each part and its consumption in nouveau and postmodern society is such that every conversation and narrative across every single function stretching from marketing to branding to pre-sales to sales to relationship management and loyalty must speak the same language to augment the cohesiveness of a singular distillate. Easily done. Right?

HOLISTIC EXPERIENCE VS TRANSACTIONAL EXCHANGE

The calibrated dissemination of messaging consistently is what is required to effect a comprehensive change in mindset to fully appreciate the value that is being delivered from luxury real estate vis-à-vis the price which is being paid. A paradigm shift is what is required to enable the holistic experience required vs just a lead generating transactional conversation making.

MAPPING BRAND ASSOCIATION TO SUBLIMINAL NEEDS

The question is how do you map each of these deep-seated desires to what the brand is offering to fulfil through several unconscious reinforcements? When this is done, the brand name simply reinforces these associations and serve as a justifier giving the consumer the ‘permission’ to buy. Justifiers’ are left-brain rationalizers that give the consumer the permission to buy into the stated luxury. The more extravagant or indulgent the supposed purchase, the more one needs to load the argument and keep tilting the argument in the favour of the decision making and consequently the set of stimuli being put out needs to be continuous feeding mechanism.

UNIFORM PULSE DISSEMINATED ACROSS FUNCTIONS

Very simply put, luxury real estate consumers have an emotionally driven, right-brained desire to purchase. There needs to be a very carefully crafted set of interaction points along the path to purchase right from the first time the consumer interacts with the brand, be it through a persuasive line that piques one’s curiosity or through some very rapturous captured moment of delight through the living environment set within the community campus. Hence, the holistic set of experiences that the customer has through every department from presales to marketing to sales and then to post purchase relationship management that has to be unified in its dissemination to the prospect. This is when the brand expression has the highest effectiveness and the default need is to own.

Corporate Comm India (CCI Newswire)