Who the purchase is for

The marketing textbook says status is about peers. What the purchase signals to the people you compete with. The car in the office car park, the watch across the meeting table.

That is a reading from a particular kind of society, and it is not this one.

Here, the audience for a purchase is very often the household. The family group on WhatsApp. The aunt at the wedding. The mother-in-law who notices the brand of the pushchair. The cousins who see the car before any colleague does, because the car goes to the family house on Friday before it goes anywhere else. Status is still the engine. The room it plays to is different.

I have watched plans written for the peer group misread whole categories because of this. A premium skincare line positioned around personal indulgence, in a market where the purchase is judged by who you will be seen using it with. A family restaurant sold on the food, when what the family is buying is being seen to have chosen well, by people whose opinion they live with. Fashion positioned around individuality, to a customer whose purchase has to pass a group before it passes a mirror.

None of this is a secret to anyone who grew up here. It is a secret to most of the decks, because the decks were written from a framework that assumed the peer group, and the framework travelled better than the truth inside it.

So the question I ask of any premium positioning now is simple. Not "what does this say about the buyer". Who is the buyer hoping will notice, and what do they need that person to think?

Answer that and the campaign writes itself. Get it wrong and you are complimenting the buyer in front of the wrong audience.