The first example of luxury goods is attributed to King Louis XIV’s finance minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, in the 1660s. At the time, France was falling behind in investing in its navies and was missing out on the wealth gained from expeditions to the New World. As a result, Colbert decided to double down on domestic production instead of international, creating the first market for luxury goods. Now that expensive goods were in much higher demand from the upper classes, it was only a matter of time before someone marketed these products to them.
Josiah Wedgwood, founder of Wedgewood Company in 1759, invented what we call marketing today. Wedgewood pioneered modern techniques such as direct mail, money-back guarantees, self-service, free delivery, buy one get one free, and illustrated catalogs. Wedgewood revolutionized how to conduct business and, when he died, was one of the wealthiest people on Earth.
As the centuries passed, marketing became a “solution” to a “problem.” If you have problems, we can fix them with a product or service. But eventually, that wasn’t enough. Corporations began to come up with new wants and new desires to sell. Think about it for a moment. It wasn’t until the 1950s that the typical teenager became a consumer category. Before that, they owned one pair of shoes, not one for every occasion. This is vastly different from today.
When you ask the question of what brands like Apple, Nike, Patagonia, and Harley Davidson, it is this: People like us buy products like this. Changing outsiders into insiders. Creating status that sends the signal to others about who we are and what we represent. Marketers no longer use simple demographics like age, race, ethnicity, gender, marital status, income, education, and employment. Today, marketing is done using psychographics to put pressure on our wants, desires, and dreams. The most famous example was in 2012 when Target had perfected its technique of analyzing consumers’ shopping habits so well that they could figure out who was pregnant before the customers even knew and were sending them advertisements to prepare for a baby.
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