TRENDS New luxury products lure middle-class consumers

Middle-class consumers are affording luxury items by cutting back elsewhere.
SEATTLE TIMES
You know you are trading up when:
You start the day with a $3 latte from Starbucks instead of a 99-cent cup of coffee from 7-Eleven.
You splurge on a Coach watch for $205 rather than a $22.99 Timex at Target.
You opt for the "near-luxury" 3-series BMW ($29,300) over a Pontiac for $21,300.
You spring for an American Girl for your daughter's birthday ($84) and forgo the $11 Barbie at Wal-Mart.
A Kent, Wash., school-district manager spends almost $2,500 on a luxury vacation to Tahiti, complete with a skipper for her chartered catamaran -- but buys discount clothes and eats "whatever vegetable is on sale that week."
An executive of a nonprofit in Tacoma, Wash., stocks up on toilet paper and other basics at Costco and Target, and splurges on imported pasta and gourmet foods from Metropolitan Market and Trader Joe's.
Luxury is not just the exclusive territory of the super rich.
Prestige for the masses
American middle-class consumers are "trading up," paying a premium for luxury items they value with high-end features or cachet, compensating by "trading down" in other areas.
"New luxury" products and services appeal to the 47 million households making $50,000 or more a year, according to marketers and researchers who have coined a word for this trend: "masstige" -- prestige for the masses.
New luxury products are distinguished by better design, ingredients or packaging -- technical advantages that "translate into functional benefits that consumers can see, touch, describe," said Michael Silverstein, a marketing expert who co-wrote the 2003 book, "Trading Up: The New American Luxury," that popularized the concept.
Among the demographic drivers of this trend, according to Silverstein: higher levels of education, an increase in disposable income and greater numbers of working women with more influence on spending decisions.
People have always saved a little here to spend a little there, said Carl Obermiller, professor of marketing at Seattle University.
Taste of luxury
What is different now: a steadily rising standard of living and brand-name goods that are more available and more affordable than ever. For better or worse, almost anyone can have a taste of luxury.
"It used to be middle-class Americans didn't know what the super rich bought or did," Obermiller said. "Now we can emulate them. ... It's not just what yacht they're buying. It's what shoes they wear."
To afford luxury, middle-class consumers have to make tradeoffs. Where one indulges, another economizes.
Costco co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Jim Sinegal believes consumers are feeling "a loss of rapture with low-price, low-quality merchandise. They're more enamored with high-quality items they can keep and count on."
With the mainstreaming of luxury, the purveyors of new luxury are confronted with a paradox: How to offer affordable luxury while maintaining exclusivity.
"If everybody can buy an indulgence, then the indulgence has lost its value," said James Twitchell, a University of Florida professor of English and advertising and the author of "Living It Up: America's Love Affair with Luxury."
Thus, the emergence of a tandem trend: "massclusivity," or exclusivity for the masses.
Emotional needs
New luxury items help define us, to ourselves and others, and feed our emotional needs, Silverstein said.
Is it troubling that we are buying all this stuff we do not need to somehow lift our spirits?
Obermiller said there may be a cost across society when people go upscale without also cutting costs.
Personal bankruptcies in the United States have nearly doubled in the past dozen years.
"It's easy to get in over your head" in a society that seems to glorify overspending and overconsumption, he said.
Silverstein dismisses worries about excessive materialism as a "media concern."
"This is about making better decisions, consuming less," he said. "It is not about reckless consumption. ... It is actually a celebration of consumer intelligence and knowledge."
Conflicted feelings
Yet even some consumers have conflicted feelings about their access to the trappings of affluence.
Laura Clenna, of Seattle, likes the quality and clean, simple style of Coach handbags, and she has amassed an impressive collection -- 10 in all. The last one she bought cost more than $200.
The King County elections worker drives a 2000 Toyota Land Cruiser, which her husband drove before she "fell in love with it."
She shops sales and discount retailers for basics such as underwear and children's clothes, but says buying luxury items is still "a difficult thing in my head."
"My mom was a secondhand-store shopper. I didn't have these things growing up," she said. "It makes me feel good -- and it's just nice to get into heated leather seats."