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*A Book Review*

No BS Marketing To The Affluent - Third Edition

By Dan Kennedy

by Michael C. Gray

September 4, 2019

What marketing demographic has money to spend?

Affluent consumers.

Over the past few decades, the middle class has practically disappeared in the United States, stratifying our population into affluent and low income consumers. Both groups have grown with the decline of the middle class.

The resources of low income consumers are absorbed with paying for necessities like housing, food, and health care. The children of low income consumers are being buried with student loan debt to finance their educations.

For businesses to thrive, they need an ample supply of customers with the ABILITY and the WILLINGNESS to buy. Marketers who are looking for opportunities to sell high-margin goods and services must sell to affluent customers, who have discretionary income to spend on luxury goods and services.

When making business decisions, this isn't a matter of fairness or morality. It's a matter of facing economic reality.

Marketing guru Dan Kennedy has done the business community a tremendous service by publishing an inexpensive marketing study of affluent consumers, which he just updated.

Kennedy breaks down the affluent into different subgroups: the Ultra Affluent, Affluent, and Mass Affluent; specialty subgroups, including Affluent Boomers and Mass-Affluent Boomers, Affluent LGBTQ, and Affluent Entrepreneurs and Business Owners; and women and men.

He examines how these groups spend their money, how they expect to be treated, and how they expect to be talked to.

There is a chapter on affluent e(motional)-factors. There are e-factors that apply to human beings in general, including fear, pride, love, guilt and greed. Affluent individuals have some e-factors of their own, like recognition, insecurity, fear of being found fakers, desire not to commit a faux pas, today, not passé, feeding emotional emptiness, giving selves gold stars, and after all, what's the point of being rich (indulgences). Incorporating the e-factors into marketing communications can make them far more effective. Marketers are striving for a "That's for me!" response.

A third of the book is devoted to how to get affluent customers and market to them. Since we are talking about marketing to a list, we are talking about direct marketing instead of general advertising. The business should be positioned as being "for" affluent consumers. The owner or spokesperson should be positioned as an authority. The prices of goods and services should be "reassuringly expensive."

Every business owner should own and study Marketing To The Affluent.

Buy it on Amazon: No B.S. Marketing to the Affluent: No Holds Barred, Take No Prisoners, Guide to Getting Really Rich.

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