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Organizing events for luxury brands

After several meetings during my recent stay in Tokyo I realized that among all the companies that try to give solutions for HNWIs, the main question boils down to how to create and organize events that have many HNWIs and influential people on their guest list. As mentioned before (in section 3.4 of my paper) the quality of such events is directly dependent on the quality of its attending guests. How do you get them to come to your party? How do you make them feel comfortable and not part of a marketing campaign?
Several introduced companies (section 3.3) have HNWI databases. The question is now what kind of relationship does the service company have with them? It can range from anonomys address lists (credit card companies), over customer databases that give legitimization to establishing contact (AdComm), to HNWIs that are themselves customers of the service company (as in the case of the private concierge services of the Ypsilon Group). But what about personal contact? What better legitimizing value for inviting someone could there be than to know them directly, having met several times, maybe even done business with them? Following the argumentation by Stanley (1997: Networking with the affluent) direct contact and acquiring up to date information on HNWIs demands personal contact. There is simply no other way to get reliable data. Asking affluents for their incomes does not produce accurate results, doing business with them over several years does. As HNWIs tend to value their privacy and only trust sources that are not directly motivated by business alone, what is needed is an intermediary, an agent, someone who can convincingly claim independence and objectivity. Such a person (or an agency) could invite HNWIs, preselect them and act in the interest of both the affluents and the companies who want to do business with them.
I talked to a CEO yesterday who is offering exactly such a service. A customer database of 6500 HNWIs and ultra-HNWIs, all of them selected in a careful process over the course of 7 years. All of them can be contacted directly without making them feel uncomfortable. I will meet with him next week again and further check the reliability of the data given to me.

The changing meaning of luxury in Japan

The middle-class consciousness that Japan was so famous for is being questioned. In the midst of this hype further confusion is caused by a perceived breakdown of traditional values such as the lifelong employment and the seniority based wage system. These changes are more than a trend or fashion. They are part of the social and demographic changes in Japan and the rest of the world, connected to such phenomena as the information age, the retirement waves of the baby boomer generation, the rising affluence among consumers, and the disappearance of clear segmentations. All these factors have led to a much more diversified surrounding for marketing products, and transformed the consumer with modest influence into a sophisticated and discerning consumer with substantial buying power (Silverstein and Fiske 2005: 9).
The term kakusashakai 格差社会, meaning a society with an income gap, has become a buzz word with political relevance. In the “lost decade” of the 90s, after the bursting of the asset price bubble, increasing social inequalities began to surface, betraying the international image of Japan as a country of equality and a population where 90% are seeing themselves belonging to the middle-class. A change in the demographic structure of an aging society with a declining birthrate can lead to a consciousness of perceived inequality (If we take a closer look at the development of the Gini coefficient, we can see that about 90% of the change in the last 10 years can be attributed to factors other than an actual change in income, namely the impact of changes in household membership and the aging population of Japan. For contemporary discussions on this topic see Tachibanaki 2005; Sugimoto 2003; Nihonsôgôkenkyûsho 2006; Hayashi 2005, and also Hashimoto 2006. The image that 90% of the Japanese used to view themselves as belonging to the middle class is analyzed critically by Sugimoto 2003: 35-46). Although the economy might have regained momentum and salaries are about to rise, this is not true for most of the part-time workers, leading to a strong polarization of living standards (Nikkei Konwakai 2005).
The transition from the bubble economy to the long economic slump, and now back to an economy of regained strength, left an enormous impact on the mind set of Japanese people (McCreery 2000: 29). The terms kachigumi (winners) and makegumi (losers) have appeared in the media and illustrate how Japanese see the effects of the “lost decade” on their society. In reality, the word kachigumi refers to at the most 1% of the Japanese population, but since these people are featured frequently on TV and in magazines, they appear to be a much larger group. Furthermore, the media portrays kachigumi-lifestyle as accessible to everyone, which has led to a perceived change in lifestyle role-models. Being a salaryman in a prestigious corporation has lost part of its appeal (Hui 2006: 42). After being disillusioned by the economical recession, continuing social turmoil have led to a desire for stability in Japan, where companies used to be the provider of social security. With additional impact arriving in recent years from global competition, and the anticipation of a time when performance is rewarded and not being persistent in adapting to predifined patterns of social selection, taking their lives into their own hands is becoming the new trend among consumers. Hakuhodo (2006b) sees people having developed a “creative sensibility” during the years of the “lost decade”, a kind of adaptive skill for consolidating and rebuilding their lives, giving way to the pursuit of distinctive lifestyles. Consumption in Japan has become more symbolic and meaningful, in contrast to the mass consumption, mass production times of the 1980s. Its is now a way to construct a personal identity.