March 2020

Luxury lifestyle marketing has changed. No longer can you simply market an image of your brand and expect that it will make a great impression on a lifestyle consumer. Today’s luxury buyers purchase items that act as an extension of their values and identity. Let’s explore how best to appeal to them.

What is luxury lifestyle marketing?

Luxury lifestyle marketing is the process of high-end brands forming a relationship with a targeted group on the basis of their shared values and interests. High-end brands use their products as a means of communicating and forging deep emotional connections with their consumers.

Each brand has an identity. For example, Jeep’s identity is the “adventurer”. Adidas’ identity is “athletic”. Each brand has an identity that’s connected to a specific set of attitudes, values, and interests. Consumers, then, want to engage with brands that have a similar identity to theirs. So, when a brand with a particular set of values appeals to a consumer with a similar set of values, that process of influence is an example of luxury brand marketing.

Appealing to the Lifestyle Consumer

No lifestyle consumer is the same. Think about your circle of friends: do all of you hold the same interests? Do you all hold the same values? Today’s lifestyle consumers engage with brands that allow them, or give them the tools, to connect with their ideal selves. In that sense, not every luxury brand will appeal to every lifestyle consumer. That is why it is important to find and forge relationships with consumers whose ideals align with your own, and vice-versa.

In general, lifestyle consumers don’t want to be “sold” anything. They want to resonate with high-end brands on an emotional level, and feel that they’re part of a community that they support, and that supports them.

In order to appeal to the lifestyle consumer, you have to ask yourself two questions:

What values do we want to promote?
What type of emotional connection do we want to have with our consumers?

By determining what type of relationship you want to have with your consumer, you’re better able to cater to their evolving needs.

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3 Keys to Building a Successful Lifestyle Brand

Your consumers’ needs and values is the foundation. So, what can we lay on top of this foundation to create something sustainable and influential? Here are the 3 keys to building a successful lifestyle brand:

1. Understand your Lifestyle Identity

Adidas’ identity is athletic. All Saints’ identity is edgy. What’s yours? Being able to clarify your identity allows you to narrow your focus, and understand what kinds of customers you’ll be forming deeper connections with. In luxury lifestyle marketing, knowing your identity helps you identify the values and products your customers will feel most connected to. By determining your identity as a lifestyle brand, you’ve just opened the door to all the necessary information you’ll need, not only to become successful, but to become influential!

2. Be Personal

If you want to forge emotional connections with potential and existing consumers, you need to know who you’re talking to. You may have people walking through your door with differing needs, yet all of them likely share similar values. It is important to create targeted messaging using hyper-personalization so that you focus on their interests. Each consumer is an influencer. You want to articulate that you hear and see them—and that you are not simply trying to sell them your product.

It’s also important to show them that you’re receptive to their perspectives and ideals. The way they are, and who they are, is of value to you, and you want to cater to that. You can also forge these emotional connections by creating novel experiences for your consumers. When your offerings and your overall branding is striking, the experiences that you’re offering to your existing and potential consumers, will stay with the people who believe in your values.

3. Leverage Wealth Screenings

Correct data tells a story about an individual. Instead of trusting that each of your consumers will find what they need from you, you have to get to know more about them. This all starts with a wealth screening.

With a screening, you can identify, divide, and prioritize your customers and prospects. This can be done bast on demographics or their propensity and capacity to spend. Instead of looking up people one by one in search, you can entire an entire list of people you want insights on which we’ll return to you all at once. This will help inform and enrich your luxury lifestyle marketing strategy.

When you look at the wealth, age, behaviors, and demographics of individual customers, you are better able to anticipate their needs based on their values. Using a screening, we can then identify their propensity to stay with your brand, and understand what they may want to see or purchase in the future that you could create. Becoming attuned to this information allows you to create a loyal customer base. More than that, you’ve now created something even more integral: community.

Even though you have a general idea of what your goal is, and you’re ready to begin reaching out to donors, it’s important to dig into the details of your campaign before you start. Ask yourself: what do we need to do before starting our campaign? What, specifically, is our goal? What’s our budget? Here are some tips and information to help you in starting a capital campaign.

What to do Before Starting a Capital Campaign

Before you begin reaching out to major donors, you need to figure out if you’re ready to start a capital campaign. When planning a campaign, it’s important to conduct:

An internal audit.

Internal audits allow you to evaluate the internal controls of your organization. By evaluating the rules and procedures of your company, and identifying and correcting existing or potential risks, you’re able to assess whether or not you’ve got everything you need to create a successful campaign. If you’re starting from a safe space, you’ll be able to bypass unintended problems.

A feasibility study.

Feasibility studies help you determine whether or not your campaign is doable. It’s important to bring in an objective, unaffiliated representative to communicate with stakeholders and focus groups. By doing so, you’re able to gauge potential donors’ opinions about your campaign. “Will people donate to your campaign? Is your board supportive of your campaign? How much could you reasonably raise?”

A pre-campaign plan.

Once your campaign’s given the green light, you can begin drafting a campaign strategy. During this time, you should begin identifying major donor prospects you’d like to contact during your quiet phase. Essentially, you’re getting everything prepped and ready to go so your team will be ready to execute your campaign when the time comes.

Answering these questions will help guide your campaign and enable you to determine your fundraising goal.

Setting Campaign Goals

The best way to set a campaign goal is to evaluate your needs as an organization. Common mistakes companies make is setting goals based upon how much is needed for the project, and jumping in immediately. The goal is then meant to serve the immediate needs of the organization, instead of the needs of the community at large. When that happens, your campaign is more likely to fail, and it takes about a decade to regain credibility in your community.

Ideally, you should create a goal that’s based upon your ability to raise the money to pay for your project. In the pre-campaign planning stage, your leadership and volunteers should agree upon the amount of money you’ll raise. It’s important to understand the passions of your donors, and then aligning their passions to specific funding areas.

After setting your goal, it’s important to outline how the funds you raise will be divided to accomplish different parts of the campaign. One way of doing this is by creating a gift-range chart. This will help you break down your goal into manageable donations that can be met periodically, helping you meet the deadline for your goal.

Setting a Campaign Budget

Now that the pre-planning stage is complete, it’s time to plan your capital campaign. After setting policies in place, and confirming that your Board and leadership team are on the same page, you have to look at your campaign budget. When looking at your existing budget, to create your campaign budget, you have to ask yourself:

Where’s our money coming from?
What’s our existing amount of money?
What percentage of our budget is coming from individuals?
What percentage of our budget is coming from foundation funding?

You also have to consider other factors in your budget such as extra staffing needed during construction; construction costs; material costs; employee salaries; travel; and events. By looking at your expenses, you’ll become more clear about how much money you’ll need to fundraise—not only for your goal but for everything leading up to it.

Finding the Right People to Target for Donations

During your planning phase, it’s important to leverage two tools to ensure that you are reaching donors who will be most likely to give to your campaign: a wealth screening and a major gift model.

Screening

Using a wealth screening, you can find, segment, and prioritize your prospects. In short: a screening can help you determine which of your donors has the greatest propensity and capacity to give. So, not only can you group donors based on demographic similarities, but you can also append your donor base with wealth attributes. This can help you more easily understand how much an individual has donated in the past (giving history) and how much they’re likely to give in the future (estimated giving capacity). By gathering these data points, you can clearly determine which of your existing donors is most likely to give to your organization. You can then create a personalized and data-driven approach to your outreach strategy, strengthening your chances to build lasting relationships with your donors–even in the beginning stages of your campaign.

Model

Not only is it important to gain a more holistic view of your existing donors, but it’s also important to determine which prospects would be most likely to give to your campaign. That’s where wealth models come in.

A model is an algorithm, tailor-made to satisfy two needs: to help you identify the unique characteristics among your donors (descriptive models) and to help you predict who’s most likely to contribute gifts to your organization (predictive models). So, a descriptive model allows us to show you commonalities among the individuals who are already in your donor base. For example, you may find that donors in your database who have decided to make major gifts are women over the age of 40 who have cats. So, what if you want to identify potential donors who are just as likely to give as this segment?

Using a predictive model, our data scientists employ WealthEngine data along with your data to create a unique, custom algorithm. Using this algorithm, we can more easily predict which prospects are most likely to contribute major gifts to your organization. This model can also help you score prospects to see how they fare against your best donors. You can then rank your prospect lists by order of similarity to your best. So, you’re able to easily determine who, within your database will contribute gifts to your organization specifically.

Uncover More Insights to Boost Your Capital Campaign

Unearth more insights on how to successfully boost your fundraising efforts using our Capital Campaign Guide.