Continued from Part 2.
The seller of luxury goods and services must market to baby boomers, who constitute an important and wealthy segment of affluent customers. Websites, marketing, and advertising must target baby boomers. You must design websites that appeal to and attract affluent baby boomers, and the websites must be consistently easy to use, so baby boomers will stay on the site. This calls for simplicity of design, more color contrast, and larger fonts which boomers can see and read, because many of them utilize reading glasses.
According to the website design engineers at Mix-UnitX, the content of websites needs to be created to target the primary interests of specific age groups. The experts at Mix-UnitX offer the following guidelines:
18-35 Age Group:
45% of gen-Xers go online for entertainment information
40% of gen-Xers go online for local and national news
38% of gen-Xers go online to play games
36% of gen-Xers go online for information about shopping and products
35% of gen-Xers go online for work
31% of gen-Xers go online for social networking, blogs and forums
35-54 Age Group: this group includes younger Baby Boomers
54% go online for local and national news
45% go online to shop for luxury products
43% go online for work related purposes
37% go online for health information
37% go online for entertainment information
34% go online to shop for luxury travel
55 and Over Age Group: Older Baby Boomers
60% go online for local and national news
44% go online to shop for luxury products and services
43 % go online for health information
39% go online for international news
38% go online to shop for luxury travel
34% go online for information about food and recipes
Glancing through the above information, the seller of luxury goods quickly sees vast differences in how and why each category utilizes the internet. The older and younger baby boomers do a lot of shopping online. They also go online to get their local and national news. Combining these two facts indicates that national news websites might be a good place to advertise luxury products. But it is more complicated than simply placing an ad on a website. Getting rid of “hope” and working with “reality” is what targeted marketing is all about.
Luxury products must be aimed at affluent customers in only one of the affluent categories: moneyed, rich, or ultra-rich customers. A shotgun strategy, trying to hit all three categories at the same time, is risky.
One risk is confusing ultra-rich customers, who may initially be attracted, but then fade, because they do not “feel” the product is quite what they are seeking. Which means the product is not scarce enough, not exclusive enough, and does not provide status enhancement. The affluent customers in the rich category, on the other hand, already own the product or something like it. And the moneyed customers would like to buy it, but feel it is presently beyond their means. In other words, by trying to score hits on all three targets, the bulls-eye remains untouched.
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