National Clothesline

During World War II, many drycleaners were given deferments from military service because drycleaning was considered an “essential” occupation.

An outgrowth of the war itself was the introduction of many synthetic fibers like nylon, rayon and others. Synthetic fibers, combined with resin coatings, led to the development of “permanent press” and “wash and wear.” These scientific “breakthroughs” changed the complexion of drycleaning from being a necessity to being a luxury.

Everyone in this business knows that there are people who can, and do, live without the use of our services. Drycleaning is not essential to support human life: like food and shelter.

The professional garment care services we offer are a luxury. And marketing a luxury requires a totally different approach than marketing a necessity.

Wal-Mart doesn’t own the country… yet

Wal-Mart alone takes in one of every $10 spent in this country at every retail and food service establishment, gas stations, drycleaners, restaurants, grocery stores, and drugstores.

It is unbelievable that an economy as big as 21st-century America’s could have a single company that controls so much of the U.S. pocketbook. Wal-Mart dominates a 10 percent share of the total $2.9 trillion U.S. retail market, excluding motor vehicles and parts. Is Wal-Mart taking over the world?

Is it any wonder that so many other businesses figure the only way to get a piece of the pie is by following Sam Walton ’s lead? The thinking is: “If ‘everyday low pricing’ works for Wal-Mart, then it’s got to work for me.”

So, like lambs to the slaughter, retailers everywhere rush to join the discounting bandwagon only to find catastrophic results.

Wal-Mart, with its strong-arm control over its suppliers and wide diversity of products, can outlast anybody, anywhere playing the markdown discounting game. Today, if you want to win in business — any business — you have to play a different game.

Starbucks coaxed virtually the whole country into paying two, three, even four times more for a cup of coffee. But this new luxury is more than just a smart business strategy. It ’s based on a new consumer psychology that goes beyond whatever is being sold to a new level of enhanced experience and richer enjoyment.

It’s a known fact that when people buy anything they don’t strictly need they are in reality buying that thing to achieve a feeling or to enhance an experience.

The only strategy that will really work and take a drycleaner and its brand into the future is to continually enhance and build more and more luxury value into their services and their brand.

No matter where your cleaners is on the luxury price continuum, from lowest to highest, you must continually reinvent your brand and keep it moving upward.

In marketing, it’s called perpetual motion. We must keep moving our brands and our services to keep them alive. We can either move upward by adding more luxury value or shift down by moving to a more moderate price point.

Either represents a real world strategy in today’s marketplace. In fact, the most dangerous strategy of all is to simply stand still.

Why? Because the natural evolution of all luxury is from the classes to the masses. First, a luxury is introduced and embraced by the affluent; then it is, inevitably, filtered down to the masses. Thus today ’s luxuries become tomorrow’s necessities.

Successful drycleaners, therefore, have to stay out in front of the luxury consumers, finding new and different ways to satisfy consumers ’ growing luxury desires.

If you really want to predict the future, you need to watch what the affluent market is doing and how it is spending its money. They are the bellwether that predicts where the rest of society will be in the near future. First the rich do it, then everybody else.

What does today’s luxury market foretell for the future of the mass market? Just that people everywhere want enhanced experiences rather than “more stuff”.

Today, with the rising affluence of the American consumer and the instantaneous transmission of information, the speed with which luxury companies need to enhance their luxury value has accelerated even more.

The increasing speed with which luxury moves from the classes to the masses is not so much a result of rising affluence and consumers ’ greater ability to buy luxury. Instead, it is a result of consumers having new information and a greater awareness of how the “other half” lives. They see it on TV or in magazines and they want it too. It doesn’t help that Bill Gates, and so many movie stars, are shown wearing blue jeans and “dressing down” all the time.

It’s human nature: whatever is unattainable is overwhelmingly attractive and desirable. Once it ’s attained, it loses its mystique; it becomes ordinary.

So it is with luxuries. We all know this experience. After years of longing for a Mercedes, we can finally afford to purchase one. You feel wonderful that first time you drive off the lot in your brand new car. There is that wonderful new car leather smell, the seats and floors are spotless, and the exterior sparkles.

But after a few weeks, that feeling of excitement and specialness you got the first time you drove the car is gone. You don ’t even notice the smell anymore. What was once extraordinary becomes ordinary, and so it goes with every single luxury we buy.

Branding is the way companies connect corporate strategy with consumer psychology. It ’s on an emotional level that consumers interact with luxury brands. In reality they don ’t need it. In fact, a good definition of luxury is that which nobody needs but many desire.

Luxuries are the extras in life that make it more fulfilling, more rewarding, more comfortable, more enjoyable. Branding is how companies communicate and deliver those emotional fantasies to the consumer.

While everyone else is jumping on the discounting bandwagon, you should go against the flow. You should find a new direction toward luxury for the masses, the classes, and everyone in between.

What’s so great about this strategy is that it is doable for any drycleaner at any level of the pricing spectrum. Today, luxury is for you, for me, for people living on huge estates, in gated communities, in trailer parks, inner-city projects, and everywhere in between.

In America’s information economy, luxury is where the action is, no matter where you start. If you are marketing to the masses today, the biggest opportunities lay in moving from mass to class by making your services more luxurious and moving up-market.

If you are marketing to the classes, then your best direction is down-market, to capture luxury-enabled and desiring customers on the fringes.

What I'm saying here is: if you are a high-end cleaner, and charge premium prices, then your best opportunity for growth may be in finding ways to deliver the same premium service at a slightly lower price or, at least, maintain your price for a year or two and allow more people ’s incomes to catch up with your price.

This, of course, is difficult to do but can be a very effective means of growing your sales. It ’s kind of like when Mercedes-Benz came out with their smaller, more economical, C-class cars. Luxury, in any facet, is the best way to build a sustainable business for the future.

Let your customers go to Wal-Mart to get their plain white bread, but when they come to you, “let them eat cake.”

Note: This article is based in part, on a major two-year consumer research study of the luxury market, conducted by Unity Marketing and House & Garden magazine.