According to American Express’s publishing unit, the top 10 percent of the US is going to be spending $224 Billion this year in consumer spending. While everyone is spending all their time on the newest diet offer, or how to kill some sort of new daily deal site, it seems much of the industry is missing out on making real money from those who have the most money to spend. Forget just the 10% of the consumers out there, let’s focus on the top 1% and figure how to make money from them.
So far there has been almost no discussion about luxury performance marketing, and frankly most of the affiliate companies that engage in this part of the industry have done a “commission junction” approach of throwing up an affiliate link and hoping people sell the products. From talking to people in those brands that pay the affiliate management companies, they don’t make any money, but just do it because it is “supposed to be part of their online initiative.”  The affiliate management companies are just happy to take the monthly fee and do little or anything to market it, except to mention in press releases to get more clients.
There has been almost no actual performance based marketing initiatives that actively look to promote and sell luxury goods on a performance-marketing basis. This is a shame, because can you imagine the possible commission on a $10k watch sold online after reading an article about luxury watches? Creating articles, building lists and hitting an affluent demographic could easily be the next “big thing” in our industry, but so far, I only found one company Lattice Media, which has been heavily promoting the idea of luxury performance marketing.
What else can we be doing to get involved more in luxury and affluent performance marketing?
