A Matter Of Wealth: Why We Should Treat All Customers As UHNWI

“Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.” These are provocative words from author F. Scott Fitzgerald, but even in the small realm of high-net-worth individuals (HNWI), there is a marked distinction between wealth and ultra-wealth. Regular access to private jet services and the chance to design a bespoke yacht or collect the finest art pieces are still a world away even for most multi-millionaires.

Engaging with this elite group requires marketers to take a unique approach. The distinctive markers of high personalization and attention to detail that are woven into all aspects of ultra-luxury consumer communications are probably some of the purest expressions of marketing techniques. Nonetheless, it is a world that has lessons for all marketers — whether they are tasked with fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) brands, challenger brands or luxury marques aiming to serve an aspiring middle class.

The Privacy Versus Personalization Paradox

In a shifting consumer landscape where matters such as privacy and data sensitivity have prominently come to the fore, the techniques applied in the UHNWI universe are particularly relevant. Never send an unprompted email to billionaires, or even worse, share their personal details!

Not so easy, though, for brands catering to UHNWI. A niche marketer simply won’t be able to ask Google or Facebook to target people worth over $200 million at the touch of a button — because that doesn’t exist as a segment. Nor would you want to accept the widely available, pre-set mass marketing tools that could end up approaching consumers who cannot afford the product, risking both diluting your investment and upsetting an audience that feels excluded.

Personalization Just Got Personal

The solution, instead, is to develop a set of tools that, taken together, will identify and address your core segment by exclusion and inclusion, reducing the message exposure to exactly that one person you are after today.

Let me showcase this using the real case of my global private aviation company. According to a Lund University study, an estimated 11% of the global population flew in 2018. Yet, there are only a few thousand people in the world who can decide to fly private on a regular basis. That’s quite a difference in scale.

With such a limited pool of targets, being irrelevant or, even worse, alienating just a few of them can have a major impact on our bottom line. Each potential client is incredibly precious. So, in our messaging, we must be thoughtful, confident and, most of all, relevant.

It’s not just what to say and where. It’s not even about us deciding when they should listen to our message. It’s a matter of assuming the right position: We need to be there for them when they want us.

Seven Ways To Get Started

1. Carefully vet the context. You don’t want to seem out of place or be associated with the wrong environment or news cycle event. Better not to speak than to speak out of place.

2. Every impression counts. Prepare to spend a long time on creating the perfect message and testing and reassessing it against every age, culture and life path in the world.

3. Engage with just the right people. Put even more attention on targeting your message correctly, since your highly targeted message would fall on deaf ears in any other case.

4. Be respectful. Even in a digitally dominated channel mix, one-to-one marketing to UHNWI requires building a tangible perception of respect for the reader. How can you show them that you care?

5. Keep painting your picture with multiple strokes. While our audience should receive multiple impressions of our message across different intersecting channels, no message should be repeated in the same way. You would not even do that to a person you meet on your way to work every day, right?

6. No message can be the wrong message. We only have one chance before a UHNWI decides to move on and discards our brand as irrelevant.

7. Make a difference. No message can be received as a waste of their time, or there won’t be another chance to be considered again.

Starting New Conversations

None of the above is rocket science; they are very simple guidelines all marketers should follow. Perhaps the very rich are not so different after all — but for me and my fellow UHNW CMOs, these are things we must do; the stakes for every message we send to the market are simply too high.

A final word of advice. Think of every message as the start of a new conversation with a guest at a gala dinner, someone you haven’t met before. Your audience must feel that you can add value not only with your product but with each one of your messages. Be helpful to their life and present things in a way that they haven’t thought about before to really capture their interest, win trust and, eventually, make them love you forever.

Enjoy the ride!