Peer Deep into Their Souls
“I do not wish to be in any club that would have me as a member.”
—GROUCHO MARX
The affluent are segregationists. Even those loudly proclaiming their liberal or socialist politics and social consciousness. Segregationists all.
In the old South, white people didn’t want to drink water from water fountains used by blacks. In the new Richistan, rich people do not want to drink the same water or use the same entrances or, God forbid, sleep on the same sheets as ordinary folk. Richistan is the “place” described by Robert Frank in the fascinating book Richistan: A Journey Through the American Wealth Boom and the Lives of the New Rich, a must-read for every marketer to the affluent. Among other things, it gives insight to the tiered and aspirational elitism of the mass-affluent, affluent, and ultraaffluent, each group emotionally validated by its purchased privileges that those one level lower are denied.
First of all, segregation has been the NATURAL order of things since cavemen. We form tribes. In elementary school, junior high school, high school, and college. At work, at the office, within our professional and trade associations. In our cities and neighborhoods. We form tribes. We form tribes more to exclude than include. We seek separation, differentiation, and disassociation from unlike as well as association with like.
In an episode of Mad Men, the outstanding AMC dramedy about the advertising agency business—and life—in the 1950s, a new woman moves into the suburban community, and she is, horror of horrors, a mother of a young child, divorced, without a husband. All the other women are married, of that tribe, and quickly close ranks to protect their husbands and themselves from the dangerous influence of this foreign, exotic creature. In a storyline in Grey’s Anatomy, the long-running medical drama on ABC, a young, progressive doctor is brought into the hospital to revamp the surgical residency program. She immediately begins changing things. Her peers close ranks, conspire against her, shut her out of surgeries, and despite evidence of the superiority of her methods, eventually get her fired. The tribe was threatened. The tribe protected itself.
These reminded me of an episode of the old Andy Griffith Show, when a stranger comes to Mayberry, and everyone becomes convinced he’s an international spy, just because he is a stranger. This speaks to the fear, paranoia, loathing, dislike, and disdain we have for the different even as we seek to feel different. The tribes we form try to reinforce our differences as superiority by excluding a majority of those we can label as inferior.
Assimilation has remained a theoretical goal but never realized. Each tribe voluntarily segregates. If this were not the case, there would be no BET or NAACP, there would be no gay pride parades or gay and lesbian magazines and websites, no Italian or German neighborhoods, no Chinatowns, no women’s health clubs like Curves®, and, in economic examples, no private schools or colleges. No one would want such things. Everyone would want only to be fully and completely assimilated with everyone else. But this is not what you want or what I want. Nor is it what liberals want; if it were, their kids wouldn’t be in private schools and there would be affordable public housing in ZIP code 90210. It is certainly not what affluent people want—they have worked very hard to arrive at the financial ability to segregate themselves.
As a political exercise in America, we keep trying to desegregate society in terms of race, ethnicity, gender, and economic status; we have geographic redistribution schemes engineered into the code. Just about as fast as we democratize something, the people affected resegregate themselves. Hotels were once used only by the rich and by business travelers; they democratized prices, but then added concierge floors, then higher- and higher-priced hotels, even to the point of putting a Four Seasons inside the Mandalay Bay. When I started flying on business in the mid-1970s, I was the young oddball in first class. With very rare exception, it was all 50-year-old white guys in suits and ties, frequent business travelers—the riffraff could not afford sitting there, and the divider was firmly policed by the flight attendants who brought us drinks, food, and even Playboy magazines and on long flights sat and played cards with us. Today, many flights have no first class, and those that do have seats dispensed at cheaper prices than 30 years ago (inflation adjusted) and often to people getting up there with frequent flier points. Air travel has been price democratized and desegregated, and even the crowd that used to go Greyhound® now flies the unfriendly skies. What happened? A giant boom for private aviation, featuring fractional jet ownership. You can’t stop segregation. And you damn sure can’t stop those with money from segregating themselves from everybody else.
What the Gates Really Are
A gated community is not really about protection from thundering hoards of criminals, as was a drawbridge and alligator-infested moat for the affluent tribe’s early predecessors. You are, of course, at far more risk of home invasion, burglary, and other crimes living in an inner-city ghetto than in a suburban gated community. Today’s gates are symbolic far more than functional. They are the grown-up version of the boys’ tree house with the rope ladder pulled up after only the chosen few in the club have climbed up. A symbol of exclusion. We are in, you are not, nah, nah, nah. The gates are symbolic of exceptional achievement, accomplishment, and status. Symbolic of the very existence of an elite tribe. Mostly, this is simple economic segregation. But as another example, consider the Florida city envisioned by Domino’s Pizza® founder Tom Monaghan, into which he poured hundreds of millions of dollars, his intent to create a Catholic gated community devoted to Catholic life. As a legal practicality, he couldn’t ban heathens or Baptists or Jehovah’s Witnesses; he could only design every brick, every cultural icon, every tribal activity to make them feel unwelcome. Gate at community’s entrance or cross in its town square, symbols of tribalism.
Dan Kennedy’s #3 No B.S. Key to the Vault
Create the tribe your desired customers are eager to be a member of.
As a marketer to the affluent, it is vital you fully understand tribalism in general, and the affluent’s devotion to membership in smaller and smaller, seemingly more and more elite and therefore profoundly exclusionary tribes.
The affluent tribalism is simply an extreme variation of all tribalism. The most important thing to understand about it is its emotional driving forces, so that you fully incorporate those same forces into your marketing. Those forces include those common to all tribalism: acceptance, recognition, peer approval, like-mindedness, and elitism. But the overriding driving force of affluent tribalism is validation of superiority. The affluent believe—whether through heritage or achievement—that they are inherently and profoundly superior to all others. The majority have arrived through accomplishment born of ingenuity and innovation, discipline and persistence, work ethic and related behavioral characteristics, as well as a philosophy they see lacking in the masses, so they do not view their affluence as luck or a gift but as a product of and then as proof of their superior character. In short, their affluence is a special form of moral authority and superiority. This is the belief system that gives affluent liberals and socialists their moral authority to dictate to others how they should live: Barbra Streisand telling people to dry their clothes on clotheslines rather than wasting energy on electric dryers, although it’s doubtful she has James Brolin out on the Malibu beach with laundry basket and clothespins. Al Gore preaching energy conservation to save the earth from global warming while flitting about in gas-guzzling private jets between giant, energy inefficient homes. Warren Buffett insisting “the rich” should pay more income tax while virtually all of his income is not subject to it, but instead taxed as capital gains. Nothing new here. Limousine liberals have been with us since first wealth. And, for the most part, they do not perceive themselves as disingenuous hypocrites. In their minds, they possess their special moral authority as superior beings.
This is the same belief system that gives affluent conservatives their moral authority to dictate to others how they should live: Limbaugh, of whom I’m a fan, but still, Limbaugh railing against drug offenders from his radio pulpit while, for a time, indulging in his own addiction to pain killers not just by doctor shopping, but allegedly by sending his housekeeper out to buy stolen drugs from back-alley dealers. This is the belief system that keeps the rich’s reaction to the homeless fellow in the doorway “Get a job” rather than “There, but for the grace of God, go I.” Affluent conservatives believe their affluence is result of superior initiative and discipline, certainly not luck of the draw.
If you are an affluent by accomplishment yourself, this may seem an unflattering glimpse in the mirror. Be that as it may, accurate, honest, realistic, and pragmatic assessment of the deep-seated beliefs of those you seek to sell to is valuable beyond price. Even the price of turning one’s self-portrait to face the wall. We are what we are.
So, what do Superior Beings want? It’s really quite simple. Recognition as Superior Beings. The sort of segregation that kings and queens have always had, that is appropriate for kings and queens. Special privileges. Fawning service. Products, services, and places inaccessible to anyone but kings and queens.