#45 She Sold Out Candles With No Marketing Budget. Then Bottega Veneta Called | Daniella Nicola

I actually haven't discussed this online before in this way, so this is an exclusive. Maybe you can actually earn a living with words. I never knew that was a viable career part before that. And then the unexpected happened when I sold out on launch. And I get sent an image from someone that they've tattooed my quote on an older that is the ultimate conversion metric. When we talk about desire psychology, it is essentially the tension of not being your ideal self. It's essentially that everyone has a self image, so where you see yourself now, currently. And then you have an ideal self. So if all your circumstances were to align, this is what your life would look like. It's kind of the aspiration of sense of self. When something just becomes commoditized, it loses the cultural capital that's associated with it. And it loses the meaning that people wanted to be associated with it. Yeah, that's why MES is trying to own the resell market. Because it's not about the investment that you like Rolex, where they own their own CPO. And the point of having an MES is the relationship that you build with it. Seduction versus changing. I'm selling a premium service. And I think there's a misconception with storytelling where people think it's this entire hero's journey. Storytelling is really just. Luxury is often mistaken for a collection of expensive products. But strip away the product and you're left with nothing but words. Most brands fail because they try to sell status or solve a problem the client doesn't ever have. Real luxury sells one thing, desire. It's about moving a person from who they are to who they want to become. This active becoming is the most human thing there is. It's older than any brand or any industry. Every culture in every era has found ways to express who they are and who or what they're expiring to become. I'm Karel Lajarodben, your host and founder of Beyond Ludgery. A strategic advisory and media platform guiding top leaders and brands on the future of luxury and beyond. My guest today is the architect behind some of the most powerful stories in the industry. Daniela Nicola is the founder of Kensington Copy, a London-based luxury brand strategy and copyrighted consultancy. She went from the world of IP law to poetry and then to perfume and build a proprietary system called Dream Awareness that maps how luxury consumers actually behave. Her world circulates in the most culturally influential spaces in the world from the New York subway to Bergedorff Goodman or clients including Batiga Veneta and other perfume brands and lifestyle brands that are at top of level. She understands that scent is nothing without a story and lets you smell it before you even see the bottle. In this episode we talk about the power of storytelling and the power of words and why the most effective stories are the ones that let the client reach a conclusion on their own. Before we begin, if you're enjoying what we're building here please follow, subscribe and leave a comment. That is what allows us to keep doing what we do and keep opening conversations that usually stay behind closed doors. Whether you're a leader in the industry, aspiring to become one or simply someone who wants to understand where this industry is heading next. This is for you. Thank you for having me. I have so many questions for you a bit before we start. I would love to know what changed in your life made you feel like words were what was going to push you forward and create the incredible business that you have today. So the way I realised that I wanted to work with words is kind of an unconventional start just like you and I think some of the most interesting stories start that way anyway. So I actually used to work in a law firm. I had no connections to luxury, not even a degree, nothing. Had I end up working with some of the biggest brands in the world? I had a secret while working at my 9-5 which was that I was publishing writing online under pseudonym and it was mainly poetry, aphorisms, blog posts, just anywhere that would let me publish my writing for free. One day I get sent an image from someone that they've tattooed my quote on their shoulder. Right. I joke today that it's the ultimate conversion metric. When you've gotten your prose written on someone's shoulder. Right, love it. So I think to myself, as most people do who work in 9-5 with a somewhat creative spirit, why don't I turn this into something of a side hustle, have an outlet for myself? So I naturally always just spend too much money on fragrances, candles, things like that. So I thought let me channel some of my writing into this medium and then I can kind of satisfy my own, you know, buying habits and, you know, make other people's just as enjoyable. And then the unexpected happened when I sold out on launch, which is I have no business experience, no marketing experience, barely even an audience and, you know, next launch sells out too. So I start going to trade shows, you know, start, you know, googling what to do next in business, okay, go to trade shows. People coming up to me at my booth and telling me that they love my storytelling and that they love my emails. So just to be clear, this launch was fragrance and candles or just candles. So start off as candles. Okay. And then went into perfume. Perfect. Yeah. Which is just because perfumes are much harder to create than candles. Right. It's an entire chemistry degree. And you were creating them yourself? Yes. Yeah. Wow. In my room. Okay. So perfect. I love that. Yeah. It's a very founder and a garage type of story. Totally. That's what I was picturing. Yeah. Exactly. Disney and Amazon going to play, you know. Yeah. And, you know, people coming up to me and saying, you know, I love, you know, this fragrance actually smells like this other brand, but I love the story that you built around it. My emails wild convert wild open rates. There's something like 60 to 75% which even for even for a modest list, that's like crazy. I don't know that at the time, but when I would show other marketers, they'd be like, that's quite insane. So I thought maybe you can actually earn a living with words. I never knew that was a viable career path before that. So that's when I decided to maybe just go all in on the marketing side of it. I didn't much enjoy distribution, operational side of things anyway. Like I said, I was doing it in my room. It wasn't a big operation with a warehouse or anything. So I decided to just go all in on the marketing side and I started doing anything from ghost writing to advertising to, you know, what I do today, which is pretty much everything from the top of the funnel, which is, you know, scripts, ads, down to retention marketing, so emails. So in a way, I was kind of having skin in the game, I'm putting my own kind of money to test these ideas to understand that they work. So now when I actually approach founders, I have that understanding, that empathy of what they're actually going through and how that feels to really understand and sell myself to them. Absolutely. And do you feel that you bring this IP legal side of you still to what you do today in your writing? Yeah, absolutely. It's actually quite a competitive edge for me because I'm always on the register, like the trademark register, you know, finding out what, you know, IP, some of my clients have insane portfolios and, you know, they like being complemented on that because it's expensive to keep up IP as well. Also, when you're using it in copywriting, if you don't use your IP, then you lose it. What exactly do you mean by that when you don't use your IP, you lose it? So when you file for a trademark, for example, you can only claim to keep using that trademark as long as you're actually using it in marketing. So you have to have some kind of viable business association with that. Okay. That's one way that you get granted that. Amazing. And we're going to talk about your dream awareness as well, which is trademarked. Amazing. I love this side of just this spontaneity of wanting to do something being passionate about something and then kind of realizing that it resonates so much with others and pursuing that path. It is such a such a founder, like a passionate founder of path. And I'd love that. There's this side that you talk about on how fragrance really is just a fragrance. And it's all about how you sell and how you use words to do so. How did you find that? And what kind of made you want to tell stories about fragrances? So I have kind of a obsessive interest with the ancient world and classical studies, being Mediterranean myself. So naturally, I always look back to ancient Greece. I think most people had an interest in ancient Egypt and things like that when they were younger. That kind of stuck with me as I got older. And my fragrances were all centered on different collections and different inspirations. But a lot of it was Greek mythology based. So especially maybe I had a Trojan inspiration collection. Or I had a one about just the women or just the pantheon. And then I can really dive into the identities and archetypes that Greek mythology put forward, which is kind of immortal in a way. So these identities, you can still see them today if you look close enough. And I think that's what resonated with people. And especially the community that it resonated with was the classical studies people, the historians. Mediterranean people obviously. So it starts niche, which is why I always recommend people if you're starting off as-- and you want to have a luxury brand-- start niche and then expand. You want to control who you're selling too first. Make sure you have a group of people who really are loyal to your concept before you expand it. If you go too wide too quickly, you're essentially just a mass market brand. That's brilliant. That's such a good way to put it. There's a concept that I love that you explain to me prior to this, which is the self-concept theory. Can you go through it? And tell me how you use the self-concept theory to write copy for the biggest brands in the world in luxury to actually get this sense of becoming for the client when they're about to buy fragrance, a perfume, a brutal product, whatever it is. So the self-concept theory is actually a psychological theory by this Canadian psychologist called Karl Rogers. And to Uber Simplifier, it's essentially that everyone has a self-image, so where you see yourself now, currently, and then you have an ideal self. So it's kind of the aspirational sense of self. OK. The bridge in between that gap, he calls it incongruence, but I'm simple and uneducated, so I call it tension. And in that tension is desire. So that is where desire is. Absolutely. Luxury only sells desires, so that's where-- Exactly. --that's where we're at. Right. And self-concept is not a fixed thing. So throughout your life, as a child, you have a different self-concept to when you're a mother, or even to even be very granular about it. Say you get a job as a VP at an investment bank. OK. This circle will view certain things completely differently. You might ditch all your designer labels. You might change your watch strap from metal to leather, because flashiness is not accepted in that circle. So your self-concept is relational to the context that you're in, and that can change all the time. That's why storytelling in this context is really about positioning your product to be the conduit or the bridge to the ideal self. So it's completely like customer dependent, context dependent, understanding who is actually buying this thing and why. That's so good. Honestly, eight years now in the luxury world, and it's one of the first times that I hear so clearly, this sense of-- I call it the sense of becoming. But this is so clearly what the sense of becoming means. And this maybe dream of becoming something or someone that is in the future an aspirational thing that you want. And in the end, it's really that doesn't matter what luxury is selling. It can be a car, a bag, a perfume, a house, an experience. It's all about how is it approaching you to that concept of love that theory. And I love how you explained it. How do you then use that to create stories? OK, so we have a framework. So I actually haven't discussed this online before in this way. So this is an exclusive. OK, I love this. Give it to us. So we always start with a brief. We always have to start with the identity brief. So this is not 25 lives in London. This is behavioral. This is-- what does she do when no one's watching? Where does she find herself at 2am? Does she feel more comfortable in a club or a library when? When you have this brief, it's not that you say, OK, this is for the woman who goes to Shea Lulee on the Thursday. You don't actually write that. This is more for the strategy purpose. Now, when it comes to execution after you have the brief, we have this framework called MVP. So simple to remember. So M stands for mythology. Mythology is actually too fold. You can have two types of mythologies. It's either borrowed or it's built. So borrowed mythology is something you see a lot in fashion, actually. So for example, when Jonathan Anderson references a deal quote and bases his entire collection on it, that is borrowed mythology. Got it. When Scaperally references Salvador Dali, that's a reference to the mythology of the founder and their friendship with the artist. Or even when Penhalagons has a fragrance called "Halfetti," that's cultural mythology. That's also borrowed. So it's borrowing the exoticism and the association with it. It's pure branding exercise, essentially, when you do a borrowed mythology. Now built mythology is internal. And this is where brands who want to build a luxury brand but don't have heritage, this is the game that they're playing. And there's kind of two ways to do this. So you can obsess over the process. In fact, I recommend you do both. So you can obsess over the process, which is how many iterations did it take? How many years did it take? How many things did you throw away before you accept? How many things do you still throw away before you actually allow things to go to your customer? And the other side of that is your point of view. And a polarizing point of view is one of the best ways to build a luxury brand. And we see this through people like Christian Van Cone-Sag who build these hyper cars who are deliberately not for everyone. In fact, you probably will never see what in your life may be because there's only so many in production. That is a type of mythology. The fact that you can never really see one unless you actually go hunt one down. And he even set himself, which I love this quote, I cannot lead by being the same, therefore I am different. So even a Rishad Mil which is another super new brand, which doesn't have like centuries of heritage behind it. The skeletonized cases, they're not for everyone. And you either get it or you don't. That's the entire point of the brand. So having this polarizing point of view and obsessing over your process is kind of the Steve Jobs method as well. That's why he's become such a mythological figure as well. So that's mythology. That's the end. That's just-- So understanding, even from a brand level, but also product level, what the mythology that you're trying to convey is, then we have V. So V is vocabulary. And that is specifically vocabulary of an expert. So every industry has their own secret language. So for fragrance, that could be like, sillage, accord, dry down, for watches that could be, you know, horology, movements, complications. For food, it could be something like provenance, mise en place, like, you know, you get the point. So everyone is speaking their own language. When you actually communicate this to a customer, it's not about proving that you're smart, it's actually about communicating that you have cultural fluency. So you have cultural capital and understand the rooms that they're in. This builds trust. And before every sale there is trust, you're an insider if you speak the same language. 100%. So we have mythology, vocabulary. And now we bring it to P, which is pictorial language. So painting a picture. OK, I have a three steps to do this. We'll take fragrance as an example. Obviously we go back to the brief. Who's the woman? For this example, let's say the woman is on a healing journey. She's reading women who run with the wolves. She prefers her own company because it brings her peace. OK, so the first thing I'll do in anything, whether I'm writing for fashion, fragrance, whatever it is, we start with a mood and a setting. So I never start by describing the act. you know, what the notes are, the features or anything like that. I want to situate you first before I start telling you about the product. So for this woman, I'd say something like the hour before dawn, someone who likes their own piece, someone who's on a healing journey, that is something that resonates with them, and they will immediately feel, "Okay, I'm in." Now tell me about the fragrance, because at the end of the day, you still need to know what it's about. You know, here is depends on your tone, how you want to describe it. You can literally just list some notes if you want. You can just be, you know, more see old word, petra call, like whatever notes that you want to list. Or you can even be more flowery with it, you know, on a bed of this, with a heart of, you know, you can be more flowery if you want to. But it's not really about that. It's more about setting the scene. And then we end it always where you kind of bring it back to the identity. So there's some kind of payoff or there's some kind of intrigue that ties the entire piece of writing together. So for this example, I would end it by saying something like, she returns home at last. So words like home emotionally charged, lands with the idea of healing, finding a place, etc. So it's all about understanding the empathy of, you know, the person you're selling to, having that empathy for them, understanding the words that they find emotionally charged is how you kind of sell a story, even with just two sentences. So the hour before dawn, she returns home at last. It's like a sentence in two lines. Love that. And that's kind of the entire point of copyrighting, right? It's get to the point, get there quickly. Say storytelling 101. Yes, exactly. So that's the MVP framework. You can kind of use it for almost anything. Brilliant. Yeah, even any type of story, right? In the end, you can use it for marketing, for luxury, but it's just you can extrapolate it into anything. Exactly. And I think there's a misconception of storytelling where people think it's this entire hero's journey, where it needs to be 12 steps. And I need to meet a mentor and, you know, have this undualed experience. Storytelling is really just a contrast. How did I feel some way before and how do I feel after? How can I resolve attention? And that can happen within you know, 300 pages of a book or in two sentences. It's the transformation of it all. Exactly. Brilliant. Also, you touch on this topic on, which I think is fabulous, which is the concept of people not liking to be told what to do. And allowing them to get to their own conclusions. Can you elaborate on that and tell us with the fundamental importance of this concept? Especially in luxury. So why I like to do especially when it comes to clients and guiding them to a certain decision that I think is best for their business. So for example, say you came to me and you said, I want to raise my prices for my consulting, but I'm scared that maybe my bulk of my clients might leave or they won't return. So first before I ever prescribe something or tell someone what to do, I will try and diagnose what's going on actually. Because sometimes what you think is an issue is actually a symptom of something else. So maybe it's that you haven't been doing much acquisition. So cash flow is shorter than it usually is. Or maybe you've been giving out too many discounts and mates rates that the profit margins are much slimmer than they used to be. So you think it's a pricing problem and really it's an operational problem or even a messaging problem. So after I diagnose the issue, I then reiterate the problem back to you in the most charitable way possible. And then that's when I slip in my idea. So for example, you'll say to me, I want to raise prices, but I don't think that people will pay that price. And I say, yeah, that's completely valid concern. So I validate you. And then I'll say, you know, especially when your differentiator is so buried on your website. So I give you a reason, it's not your fault, it's your website. It's a force of nature outside of your control. So it's not me versus you and I'm telling you what to do. It's just, it's the website's fault, okay. And then I slip in my idea and I say something like, so when we rebuild it, so I'm really assuming that we're going to do this thing together, when we rebuild your website, we need to run a test. Maybe maybe what if we run a test? So I'm slipping in a question, what if we run a test, new landing page, let's up the price by 10% and then we bring the differentiator into the hero section. How does that sound? So I'm kind of validating you, I'm making a big the blame on something that is outside of you. And then I offer something as a question rather than a prescription that you need to do this. Because otherwise if I come to you and I say you need to listen to me, I'm an expert, or even just coming to you and saying, you know, have you not heard of like, Vibram, you know, pricing, you know, it's going to increase your perceived value. This is very me versus you and it's kind of tyrannical. Nobody likes to be told what to do, especially business owners who are quite high agency in themselves, especially luxury brands, especially luxury brands that, you know, yeah, they've got it all figured out always. Exactly. Yeah. So you never want to attack someone's agency by giving them a direct prescription of what to do. You want to massage it, bring them to the conclusion themselves, you want to ask questions to prescribe what's actually happening. So then they can think, oh, maybe it's not actually that, maybe it's something else. And then you can kind of guide the conversation through questions. Brilliant. There's also another concept that you've gone viral for, which is advertising as a private club. And this concept on seduction versus pitching. And truly that is one of the, I think, most iconic off of the incredible insights and frameworks you're giving us. I think this one is so iconic for luxury brands to not only understand because they understand it would actually implement it. I think that's the hardest part is to make sure you're implementing all the time, knowing something is very different to the action of it, right? And in times where things move so quickly, shift so quickly, we were talking about Gen Z until now, now we're talking about Gen Alpha. And there's all of these new factors that keep popping in, whether it's geopolitical or it's generational or it's social behavior or it's, you know, like when the pandemic hit, there was a whole nother shift. There's all these shifts happening all the time and there's so much uncertainty happening. These, this kind of seduction of treating something like an internal insiders club, there's something safe about that. And like feeling like I'm somewhat protected. So I love this concept and I'd love for you to dive a little bit further into it and it's important. Exactly that. So when you make something feel like a private club exactly like you said, it is all about earning the access, making the transaction feel like you've earned this protected group access to a kind of culture or a micro society that other people can't get into. So the new era of luxury is all about where you belong rather than what you own. So where people do that, so even potato Vanetta, they'll run a campaign that says when your own initials are enough. That automatically devise the audience, the people who get it and the people who don't. That goes back to like the polarization that we spoke about. The people who get it, they feel like you said, safe in that knowledge. They feel, oh, we're part of the people who get it and the other people is an us versus them dynamic. That is automatically created through just a few words. And the real persuasion here is the absence of persuasion because a club that has to convince you to come in is not a very good club. So in a sense, the friction and the barrier to entry is not a bug, it's actually a feature. So the wait lists, the even the high price, the you have to vouch for someone, not everyone can just come in because if anyone can just buy their way in, then it loses all meaning and that's kind of the scrutiny that Vogue is under at the moment being owned by billionaire technocrats, right? So when something just becomes commoditized, it loses the cultural capital that's associated with it. And it loses the meaning that people wanted to be associated with it for. That's why a mess doesn't have, yeah, that's why a mess doesn't try to own the resale market because it's not about the investment value like Rolex where they own their own CPO. And the point of having an amaz is the relationship that you build with it because if you just make it about the investment, it just becomes an inexpensive bag. So it's all about I understanding that it is about the experience and it is about the relationship that you create and The product is actually kind of secondary But the actual counter-intuitive part about this is that In order to have desire To want a belong part of that club people have to not be able to get in so there's this kind of ecosystem that's created where the aspirational buyer and the ultra wealthy buyer Depend on each other to make these brands actually valuable and It's something that Pierre Bourdoux says where he says Social games are not fair games It's a zero-sum game in order for someone to win someone has to not be part of it So that's essentially the the feeling of being part of a club It's the idea that I'm in because someone isn't and that brings The meaning yes exactly out of it. That's Again brilliant love that There's this concept of copyrighting that I think is Not well understood today about the nuances between what you see on billboards and the small print letters that are on packaging What is a relationship between those two and how do you treat it as a? Expert copywriter for luxury brands So this might be a bit controversial Because everyone in my industry in marketing and advertising tells you to sell feelings the feeling is actually quite consistent every part of the customers journey and What that means is at the top of the funnel? You want to create tension So I need to have something that is either provocative Amusing something to stop me in whatever I'm doing in my day-to-day life to pay attention This is the attention economy. That's where it lives top of funnel So something it's designed to be a little bit jarring even showing you something aspirational can create some envy and you create some tension because it's triggers that self-concept of I'm not there Then when you get to the middle of the funnel the middle of the funnel is all about trust That's the entire name of the game here. So here you have maybe it's social proof if you're a premium brand Maybe it's your endorsements if you're a luxury brand You have a proof that what your claiming actually works Then in the bottom of the funnel is where most brands actually mess up So the bottom of the funnel is the purchase page and the idea of a thorough retention in here as well So there's everything from the unboxing to the packaging To the communication post-purchase the entire point of the bottom of the funnel is to avoid post-purchase regrets You have to be doing back flips to ensure your customer does not at any point doubt their purchase When you start out and you're a new brand You will be doing things that aren't scalable At this point because you need to make sure nobody turns around and says I regret buying that because as a new brand That's more detrimental than just not getting a sale at all Because preventing further sales is gonna kill your brand more than just not winning one person So at this point if you're a new brand let's say first two years You'll be doing things that aren't scalable in order to make sure people don't feel regret And I actually think that retention marketing is extremely underrated when it comes to luxury brands so a lot of the experience is focused on the acquisition And Emma's actually does this quite well with the Experience of purchase. No, you open it up. There's layers of tissue paper There's another bag within a bag. So it becomes an entire ritual The ritual is part of the experience which prevents regret So the actual emotions are quite consistent in each part of the journey What you should really be focusing on is the identity that you're trying to sell That's why I always say sell the identity not the feeling because the feeling is consistent You can that's the formula. There's a formula to feelings with identity It's a lot more empathy based and a lot more research based and contextual The thing I think a lot of people misunderstand about copyrighting is that it's just you know string together a tagline or And I think copyright is themselves undersell their own industry a lot of the time Because they say you know I charge by the word When you're doing hours and hours of research to actually get to write three words that might have taken three weeks to write You know, there's a famous tagline famous headline that's Ogre V wrote about the Rolls-Royce and that is you know at 60 miles per hour The only thing that you can hear is the clock on the Rolls-Royce something like that That headline took him three or four weeks of research to write and It's one of the most famous headlines, but it didn't just come to him from You know just looking at a page and putting together some words or prompting and Right exactly it came from understanding what the customer was actually saying about the product and This is something that we do with our agencies somewhat unconventional research method is we So I'm based in London, but a lot of my clients are based in New York and the States So we will regularly fly over to places where they are in shelves on on their shelves and their retail spaces and we will strike up conversations with the sales associates and We will ask them, you know, what do you recommend? Should I buy this brand like acting like I don't work for them? And what are other people buying? Why are they buying it? So we're trying to find out what the actual language people are using when they come in in real time And we even like wait around for real customers to come in we ask them questions I find that people in in America are very friendly and they're open to conversations a lot of the time So this really helps the research process Yeah, it wouldn't really help work another place. No, no, not many places So if you did it here in Paris people would be like yeah, get reported So we're able to find the actual voice of the customer right and I think when people talk about you know tone of voice and voice What you really want is to be mirroring the person's actual language back to them So if we go back to like desire Self-concepted center is actually a formula Which is what we spoke about right the image and the ideal self? Another way I like to put that is mirror plus vision equals desire If you mirror their language back to them that is to say you're not shaming them for where they are You're just empathizing with them you're showing them that you can relate that they can trust you because you understand them and Then you show them where they could be or their life could look like That will create that gap between those two things will create the desire Fascinating, honestly everything all you're filled with such great knowledge of concepts and insights that I feel as someone that has worked in the industry for almost 10 years now Understand and know but you're putting words and concepts to it and it's so brilliantly done and I so agree with it I'm not a copywriter, but I write and You know, I've I write in the form of articles. I write in the form of books and I've now actually started to write some poetry so I write and I use words and I love words, but I see In copywriters that use that have literally it like your real estate is so short The work is so it's so much easier to write a long article than it is to shorten it sometimes I write a pretty long article for our own publication on substack and then I Share it with Jingdaily or with Jean-Addedrucks or with a column that I'm writing for and They'll tell me like you have to cut it a thousand words. I'm like well Where do I cut it everything is so and there's such a maybe I took I don't know three days to write it or two days to write it and then Five days to cut it right? Yes, so I can't even imagine where to start when you are starting from scratch and you literally have five words or a sentence or like Nike just do it I don't know how long that took and I don't even know who did that but Wow like just do it. I mean three words that will completely revolutionize a brand and The emotion of anyone that ever thinks of Nike that's insane right or got milk like yeah, what how long did I think it was my can that did got milk It's you know it that there's a whole Concent behind it and learning about your research and how you do your research really also puts in place in like everything kind of like strings together on like MVP and the whole concept of research and the whole concept of the self and how you're going to get to that becoming, right? Then there's one that we haven't talked about that I want to talk about to me is the dream awareness. Dream awareness versus, you know, the fast social media that we kind of see today, which is also very interesting because you also have a pretty big following in the whole social media side that we can touch in a second. But I want to first touch on dream awareness, which is something you've trademarked and I love what you said at the beginning if you don't use what you've trademarked, you actually can't keep using it. So how do you use it and what is it? So dream awareness is a framework that I created when I was first starting out in marketing and I realized that there was no real framework for selling to premium and luxury customers and a lot of the advice that you get is actually mass market. So urgency, FOMO, all of these things that kind of create panic in a buyer, which is not the buying environment that you want to create for a luxury buyer. So specifically for premium and luxury buyers because that's where aspirations actually come into the transaction and it becomes actually less of a transaction and more about purchasing of an identity. So when someone's buying a premium or a luxury good, they're actually envisioning a and simulating a future version of themselves when they buy it. And that's where the idea of dream awareness comes from. So you want to be aware of what they're actually aspiring to, what their dreams are, their inner monologue. So when it comes to actually mapping out the difference between a premium buyer and a luxury buyer, the premium buyer is operating from something I call a deficit gap. So this is where you are trying to aspire to something and engineer a better version of yourself. So the messaging here, which is something you see a lot on social media is you're seeing this for a reason. You can do it because you have thought it. If you can think it, you can claim it and you can become it. This is premium messaging. It's still aspirational messaging. Luxury buyers or ultra wealthy buyers are actually operating in something what I call the threat gap. So what this means is, is again, there's still a gap that is still the self-concept idea. But the gap for them is more about losing their standing in their in their group. So what that means is when everyone has money around you, you're not really aspiring to this kind of aspirational lifestyle. It's more about keeping up and competing on things that are rather non-financial. So things like uniqueness, taste, access. These are things that luxury buyers appreciate more than, you know, I'm belonging to this kind of, you know, Lululemon tribe that is a bit more expensive because now I can, you know, right, aspire to a wellness lifestyle. It's more about, am I going to places before everyone else? Am I an earlier doctor? This is things that the luxury buyer belief system actually cares about. So the deficit gap and the threat gap. And then from there, we have with these different beliefs. So how I translate that to social media is, I'm selling a premium service. So what that sounds like is, I am not educating someone. Even though a lot of my content feels educational, I'm actually leading you and then bearing education later. So I'm telling you, if you want to be a luxury brand, that's an aspirational concept. I'm not saying, this is how you boost your revenue. That's, you know, pure education. I want to sell you the identity fast. I want to tell you, if you want to play with the billionaire brands, if you want to be a household name, these are identity markers. I'm leading you in a sense of, this is how you get to your, I suppose, to get to your ideal self. And the way to keep people watching, so that's the hook. How to keep people watching is to have open loops. So you delay the how. So I can then agitate a little bit on what the identity feels like. Oh, so you might, you want to be a household name, you want to be associated with these other brands. And this is how you keep people watching that your education doesn't feel boring, because at the end of the day, education is quite boring. You know, sometimes you get to that part of the video and people just keep just scroll on. You get to the actual how to and people don't want to hear it. So it's really is about guiding them to that point where they're almost, you know, begging for the information. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I can relate to that. Sometimes I like speed times to them, like just tell me what it is. And sometimes they don't even. And you're like, let me just listen to the story. Yeah. Yeah. That's brilliant. It's so clear that everything you explain and how you do it, you're, you're using, you're really walking the talk through the whole podcast. I'm like, and I was like so many of these concepts you've talked to me about them before. And still, I absolutely love it. I have some short kind of questions that I ask all my guests at the end of the episode to get a feeling of where we're at today and where the industry is at. The first one is one that is unfortunate to me that is a word, luxury has kind of just lost its meaning. And I try to understand the meaning of this word from people that work in the industry. And I'd love for you to tell me what it means to you. So the way I define luxury is three different ways. So I try not to make this too long. There's capital L luxury, which is the industry that we're speaking about. Yeah. Then there's the personal luxury. So this is things like more defined as freedoms. So things like having the time to read a book in a really busy day. And I think as we kind of compete with the cost of a machine versus the value of life, that will become more the definition of what luxury is. And then there's the kind of transactional version of luxury, which is like an add-on to something you're already buying. Like if I'm going to the spa, I might add on champagne at reception. That's a, that's really a premium service, but it's defined as, you know, it's a luxury for some people. So there's three ways to kind of define it. I think the more interesting one is a blend between capital L luxury as an industry because that defines the operational things that you do plus the definition of what people actually think of it as. Brilliant. Looking to 2030, what do you see happening to the world of copywriting, especially with AI? And I know this can go into a big kind of topic that we, I intentionally did not mention in this podcast because I think that everything you just explained, explained so well why the human is so essential to this piece. But where do you see it moving forward towards? So the commoditization of copywriting through AI will do two things. Number one is make bad copywriters obsolete, which is fine. And the second thing it will do is make strategic thinkers even more valuable. And maybe then the industry was underselling itself and stopped playing by words and actually playing by what it is, which is a positioning game, a differentiation game and an articulation of the essence and differentiation of a brand. I love that. What are three words that describe this industry, the capital L luxury industry for you today? Three words for me would be the human experience. Boom. You're so good. And finally, as someone that is in the industry today, what is a skill that you think is underspoken about or kind of neglected that people that are trying to get into the industry or you know, build in the industry are lacking or should be more attention to the number one skill. If you have no connections, you have no degree, nothing. If you have curiosity, you will get anyway you want in life because you will stop caring about how you benefit and you will start caring about what you can do for other people. And that is the essence of value. Thank you for saying that. Danielle, thank you so much. This has been one of like the most clear, just tangible, such interesting way of explaining what copyrighters do, what you do and what the industry needs to know about storytelling and how to tell the stories to actually be able to show this becoming show this aspiration over where we're going. Thank you so so much for sharing all of these insights. I know you shared with us some exclusive content. So I super appreciate it. Thank you for being here and I really hope we can have more of these moments. Absolutely. It's absolutely pleasure. To everyone listening, if this conversation gave you something to think about, please follow and subscribe to the podcast on Spotify, Apple, YouTube, or anywhere you listen to your podcasts. Your support means the world and it allows us to keep doing what we do and to bring incredible guests on this podcast. And if you want to go deeper on a written analysis and insights on what's going on in this industry and its implications for the future, subscribe to our substack where we go beyond the surface every week. A lot of you ask where to find us or how to work with us, everything is on the link tree in our show notes and more on our website below on Beyond Lodge Ray Dog Group. If you're interested in strategic advisory speaking engagements or anything else, please don't hesitate to reach out. Thank you and see you next time. [BLANK_AUDIO]