Luxury Marketing, a course for MBA Students at The University of Georgia
After a two week delay due to the megatron-level ice storm that hit Atlanta, I finally had the opportunity to conduct my first lecture in the Luxury Marketing Class at the prestigious Terry College of Business at The University of Georgia’s Fast Track MBA Program.
By way of background, I have 41 graduate students enrolled in the elective directed study course. The number in and of itself shocked me since I had hopeful expectations for 10 students. The students are all young professionals enrolled in a Professional MBA Program that allows them to earn their degrees while continuing in their full-time professions. In other words, they are very dedicated and very hard working people. The mix of industries represented by the students is quite wide, ranging from self-employed to Fortune 500 Companies in a variety of different industry segments. The professions are also varied, finance, accounting, marketing, and just about every other discipline.
I had a simple purpose in the first lecture:
Challenge conventional thinking about marketing of a brand by presenting a detailed look at “effective” and “ineffective” marketing in Luxury Goods and Services. The application may seem dubious at first if your buisness or firm is not engaged in the luxury sector…until I make the connection.
Effective luxury marketing is niche or Long Tail marketing. It is built on a strategy of believing that you do not have a mass market but as Chris Anderson says, “…a mass of markets.” Luxury Marketing is about targeting and engaging those niche markets.
Among all of the varied industries represented by the professionals in my class, I was unable to determine an industry where niche marketing would not have an immediate and significant benefit.
My course content consists of three main components:
- Class Lecture and online discussion boards
- Case Studies
- Guest Speakers
Since this was the first class, it consisted primarily of class lecture which I’ve uploaded to Youtube as a movie you can watch below. You may need to stop and start the movie to read all of the slides. I’ll post more after the next class which will include a guest speaker, Mr. Lincoln Jackson, Group Publisher at Curtco Media, (The Robb Report).
