Premium is a price

Three words do the same job on this side of the world, and they are not the same word.

Expensive is a price. Luxury is a story other people tell about you for owning the thing. Quality is what the thing is like on the thirtieth day. A brief that says premium has usually meant one of them and hoped for the other two.

I came up through categories where the hope was understandable. In a market that will pay, raising the price is the easiest move on the board. The pack gets heavier, the label goes black, the word premium goes on the shelf strip, and the margin improves by Thursday. Expensive is the only one of the three a brand can prove on day one. The customer checks it at the till, in one second, and that is settled.

The other two are proved somewhere else, by someone else, later.

Quality is proved in use, and nobody from the building is there for it. The cream in the second month. The shirt after the fifth wash. The chair when the cousin sits on it. The price promised something, and the product keeps the promise or does not, in private, long after the campaign has reported.

Luxury is proved by the room. Not by the brand, by the people in the room when the thing is seen, and by whether they know what it is, what it costs, and who else does not have it. That is a story the brand can feed and cannot write. Here the room is usually a family, which makes it a slower story and a more loyal one.

So the premium brief has made the one claim it could make alone and is waiting for the other two to turn up by themselves. They do not. The price goes up on a Monday. The reputation, if it comes, arrives by a route the plan never drew.

Charge more and you have proved that you charge more. The rest is proved by people you will never meet, in rooms you will never see.