Luxury Tech: An Inconvenient Truth
People who understand technology are moving into luxury careers. People who understand luxury clients are moving out of the sector and retiring. I wish they could both be in the same room together a little longer. They could learn from each other. Luxury is a people business. It is product marketing conveyed by the range of human personality sprinkled with a heavy dose of prestige. Tech is a device, production, distribution, and access business, providing efficiency and convenience. It too involves personality as people are required to make creative decisions, feed and run devices, and handle the physical product. The masterful question: How much tech can be put in and how much personality can you take out, and still have luxury?
It's a miscalculation when an entrepreneur tries to convert a people business into a total technology business. It does not work. It is like trying to only communicate via email or text. The absence of human interaction leads to misunderstanding. Reading words is not the same as hearing them with emotion and emphasis and seeing facial expressions. Technology is meant to be a tool for people – helping us share our humanity better. People are not the tools of technology. I’ve seen too many entrepreneurs and venture capitalists behind them get this wrong. If you want to create an extraordinary business, and one of your goals is to make it heavily automated, you’d better have a plan that includes the right dose of personality in the process.
First, you must remember that you must deal with the personality of your tech people. Are they interpreting you correctly? Are they understanding the client, right? Are they overestimating the problems tech can solve? For example, I’ve had websites send me messages in response to a help inquiry that were pulled from a database of pre-planned responses. Without having a human being to listen to the detail and understand the nuance of my situation, the response was useless. Even with AI, and other emerging technologies, the impact will only be as good as the wisdom and experience of the people behind it.
I saw this long ago. Concerned they might lose their multi-million-dollar investment, a New York venture capital firm once offered me the CEO position at a tech startup after its founder died unexpectedly. They had invested in the company based on the stellar reputation and accomplishments of the founder, but now he was gone. When I visited the company, I could see the business was poorly conceived, overly dependent on technology and not a sound business model. In my assessment it was doomed for failure. I declined and the company folded, declaring bankruptcy.
Like many ventures, luxury brands positioned to investors as tech companies are going to be revealed as companies more dependent on marketing, which is another way of saying, understanding people, and learning the nuance of relating to them. The investment dollars will eventually run out, and the appearance of success will give way to the reality of needing to understand and communicate well with human beings.
If you’re wondering why the tech aspect – whether it is eCommerce, or digital this or that, of your luxury business is not delivering the results you’ve expected, it is probably because there is not enough personality in your approach. Not opening emails, not clicking links, visiting the site but not buying, common human behavior, is not a tech problem but a problem resonating with people. You need more humans to see your offer and accept it or reject it. Hopefully the right humans created it.
Write me at: info@andretaylor.com , to get more tips on technology and your luxury business.
At Taylor Insight we help premier and luxury businesses excel and grow by attracting, retaining, and growing with affluent clients. We provide exceptional strategic, marketing, sales, and service guidance, and a portfolio of high-impact learning programs.
