Page 139 - 100 Great Copywriting Ideas: From Leading Companies Around the World (100 Great Ideas)

63 HOW TO GO UPMARKET

There are times when you want to go deliberately upmarket.
Perhaps you’re selling a very expensive product; or you’re selling
a cheap product to very expensive people. Either way, you need to
strike that elusive tone of voice and style that reassures your reader
that they won’t be rubbing shoulders with the hoi polloi if they buy
from you.

Preserving that sense of exclusivity is about more than using
the word “exclusive.” In fact, along with “exciting” and “unique,”
“exclusive” is one of the most overworked old nags in the language,
repeatedly pressed into service and weighed down with expectations
that it can never deliver.

The idea

From The Economist Group
I have written hundreds of conference promotions for this company,
whose delegates are usually charged around £1,000 a place. So not
cheap. But, for my client, still an average event in style, content, and
delegate profile. When they decided to go truly upmarket, they did
without delegate fees altogether. The pitch wasn’t, “If you have to
ask how much it costs, you can’t afford it.” It was more like, “If you
have to ask whether you can attend, you can’t.” In other words, it
was all about the exclusivity of the event. Called The Global Agenda,
it convened (still does) small groups of extremely influential and
powerful individuals. Not just any old CEOs but CEOs of the world’s
largest corporations. Plus Nobel Prize winners, leading academics,
and very senior politicians.

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