No B.S. Marketing to the Affluent

is all the more important and will soon again also be urgent. THE TWO REQUIREMENTS FOR YOUR PROSPERITY Ultimately, to prosper you need an ample supply of customers with two attributes, ability to buy and willingness to buy, both as a constant. Whether the economy continues to expand or reverses and shrinks, whether unemployment holds on to Trump-economy all-time lows or returns to ten- or twenty-year average norms, whether the middle class's destruction slows to a crawl or resumes a fast pace, no matter what external conditions occur, you need a bastion of consumers with both constant, uninterruptible ability and willingness to buy. Such customers can only be found among people of affluence, not just in income, but in their net worth and emotional state. Building a business around any other population is, bluntly, self-sabotage. A business otherwise organized is always fragile. When heavy rains come, its crops and buildings are washed away. This book is all about building your bastion. To move you from curiosity and half-hearted, tentative action on the advice and strategies in this book to wholehearted, passionate, courageous, aggressive, and urgent action, I want to take a few minutes to summarize the facts of this middle-class shrinkage, provide some evidence of its impact so far, and try to paint a vivid picture in your mind of this as a present and accelerating reality. We can begin with a few statistics. These are compiled from various authoritative sources. How bad did this get? How bad will it get? Beginning with the recession that was triggered in 2007-2008 and lasted through 2013, with the damage accelerating and peaking during the Obama years, the median U.S. household net worth plummeted by 43%. This manifested in many ways, with the upside-down home mortgages being the most visible and retirement savings accounts 401k the clearest loss to many. In these and many other ways, wealth, and with it the ability and willingness to buy things for years, and decades to come, erased. This damage at the top of the economic pyramid, while harsh, was and is far from devastating. If you have ten million dollars and lose 43% of it, you still have 5.7 million dollars. It didn't and doesn't matter much to the bottom of the pyramid. If you have zero and lose 43%, you still have zero. But in the middle, it murdered and is a murderer. There it forcibly moves a middle-class consumer to a low-class consumer. There it changes a frequent discretionary spender into a buyer only of essential commodities. As it slaughtered those in the middle, it sucked the very life right out of the economy. More important, these lost years of lost wealth and spending capability will never be recovered from by these slaughtered middle-income consumers. So in your own business lifetime, you will not see a rebound of their best spending. To add insult to injury, generational replacement spending by millennials is defying historic trends, is at a minimum, and is concentrated into few categories. Where are the first-time home buyers, home furnishings buyers, new insurance customers, etc.? Buried under a stunning $1.5 trillion of college debt in their parents' basements. In those years, we saw a drop in net worth in almost all income categories, from the top 5% to the near bottom. Only the bottom 25th percentile saw an increase, but that is deceptive because in calculating, the government counts the earned income tax credit and food stamps as income, and Mr. Obama was the food stamp president. There are profound differences in how people in different income categories react, and can react, to net worth losses. Towards the top, most high earners have options for amping up their earnings to replace net worth losses. The high six-figure income professional can raise fees, take on more clients or patients, maybe cut overhead or staff. They have a great deal of control. My own earning capability has a dial like a thermostat on it that I can adjust by my own hand. I always have options, writing three books in a year instead of two, accepting a few more speaking engagements I now turn down, promoting more and attracting more clients. Some top income earners have reacted that way. Others did not, but didn't need to, and their discretionary spending capability.