Entering the Super league

Every now and then an idea comes along that is so challenging, so revolutionary, so remarkable that it’s best ignored.

One such is the discovery by Condé Nast of a small group of high rolling consumers whom it dubs the Super As. Marketing men, it is alleged, have greeted the news “with all the enthusiasm anthropologists normally reserve for a long-lost tribe”. In other words, they have ignored it. And quite right too.

The Super A wears Armani suits and carries Gucci bags. He or she not only has money, but spends it. It is this willingness to disgorge the readies that distinguishes the newly discovered socio-economic category from its outmoded predecessor, the AB.

Thus Princess Diana on a shopping binge in New York is a Super A, whereas Prince Charles, with the tight-fistedness that is in the Windsor genes, is not.

According to Condé Nast’s managing director, Nicholas Coleridge, traditional ABs may no longer be those with the money. University professors, farmers, headmasters and librarians have been outpaced by estate agents, money market traders, and financial advisers.

Drawing on the anecdotal, Coleridge tells us that in the Cotswold village where he once rented a weekend cottage there are seven large houses, only three of which are inhabited by people of interest to advertisers. “The other four owners are charming people, good people, pillars of the church… excellent, worthy members of the local community – but as target consumers they are a dead loss.”

The squire in the manor house is singled out as a dead loss of special note. “He is not even going to buy a new cartridge bag in the next ten years, let alone a Land Rover Discovery or a bottle of Safari aftershave. He is not going to buy a new tie, because he has inherited 20 knitted ones from his father.”

Now we know what Coleridge is on about. To him and to his magazines the only consumers worth addressing are those willing to spend money on premium-priced products. All others are a dead loss. That is perfectly understandable but it doesn’t point to the discovery of a new and different species of spender.

The traditional AB category includes – but not exclusively- professors, headmasters and librarians, all of whom have always been a bad bet in the books of those who sell Armani suits. Social grade A is defined as upper middle class in higher managerial, administrative, or professional occupations. The Bs are middle class in intermediate managerial, administrative, or professional occupations.

These remain useful and practical categories for the purposes of advertising. People in senior managerial positions are known to buy aftershave and take holidays, just as Coleridge would wish. It is, however, true that prosperous traders with new money have never been easily accommodated in economic and demographic data. Estate agents, financial advisers, and money traders are likely to be working class in origin, and their chosen careers cannot be described as managerial, administrative or professional.

The same may be said of pop singers, footballers, and lottery winners. Ditto women who marry into royalty and become spendthrift – though HRH The Duchess of York, as always, complicates the picture by being born into the middle classes but having a distinct whiff of cockles and mussels about her.

A successful market economy is bound to throw up individuals who suddenly become rich either through their own effort or by chance. They are, however, too disparate, and inchoate to constitute a meaningful socio-economic grouping. All that unites them as a category is that they have money and are quite possibly vulgar with it.

Condé Nast estimates the lost tribe which it has unearthed numbers some 500,000 souls. That compares with about 8 million old-fashioned ABs. So purely in mathematical terms, it makes sense for marketers to stick with their existing targets, many of whom are proven spenders.

The Super As do not need to be targeted. For there is a law by which people with new money, and lots of it, are drawn instinctively to the meretricious and the costly. You don’t have to tell them, or even persuade them, to buy designer label suits, Rolex watches, or Porsches. They know how to root out the most expensive hairdressers and the most fashionable restaurants. Something tells them their bathtaps should be gold plated.

If, however, there was some compelling reason to reach the Super As – to inform them perhaps of a new variety of designer colonic irrigation – the best way is to mail them. Estate agents can be found in the Yellow Pages; we all know where Princess Diana lives; and Nick Leeson’s whereabouts are no secret.

There is much to be said for direct mail, not least that its targets can be pinpointed with accuracy. Chris Eubank, for example, who is cited as a Super A because of his taste for expensive clothes and motorbikes, would I am sure welcome a letter drawing his attention to some new means of exhibitionism, as would Lord Archer, another Super A.

It has always been the case that there are people in Britain with money and no class and others with class and no money. The strands of snobbery and wealth, taste and vulgarity, class and code are interwoven into such intricate patterns that they defy analysis, let alone succumb to the crudities of bald categorisation.

The squire in the Cotswold manor house may have no need of a Range Rover Discovery nor of a Caribbean holiday. But I’ll bet he buys lavatory paper – a market worth some 600m a year – and he may well be susceptible to the blandishments of branding. No one is a dead loss to advertisers.