In a short pro­file of ‘lux­ury sales con­sul­tant’ Jean-Marie Brücker, we dis­cover a few psy­cho­log­i­cal tech­niques he teaches to his clients on how to sell high-end lux­ury goods:

  • Describe an item in terms of its ‘value’ rather than it’s ‘price’ or ‘cost’.
  • Sell a story (‘romance’ and ‘emo­tions’) rather than ‘products’.
  • The mac­a­roon tech­nique: sand­wich­ing the price “between the product’s more roman­tic benefits”.
  • Har­bour and elicit pos­i­tive emotions–they sell (e.g. com­pli­ment your cus­tomer on their exist­ing items, even if they’re from your competitors.
  • Don’t dis­count. Gift instead (dis­counts get for­got­ten, free gifts don’t).
  • Cre­ate con­trast between old, exist­ing items and new ones.
  • Sug­gest ‘sorry-gifts’ for those who may lay guilt on the pur­chas­ing party (e.g. their partner)

As ever with these things, I believe you could sum­marise it as: play on and exploit a customer’s emo­tions (hap­pi­ness, guilt, etc.) while using sub­tle lin­guis­tic tricks to dis­guise the price.

These hap­pen to be key tenets of casino mar­ket­ing, which revolves around flat­ter­ing men, dis­tract­ing their wives, and keep­ing them around as long as pos­si­ble; the longer they stay, the more likely they are to spend money. But Mr. Brücker was never dis­dain­ful of customers—in fact, he cham­pi­oned the need for bet­ter, more thought­ful ser­vice that makes the cus­tomer sense car­ing and qual­ity —the stuff of luxury.

“You’re sell­ing pure emo­tion,” he said. “That’s why I love this job.”