My new $19,450 cellphone
Vertu, a wholly owned subsidiary of Nokia (just like Lexus is of Toyota) aims to bring cellphones into the realm of luxury products. Soft sell events were held across the world all year to introduce its new $19,500 platinum cellphone that shipped in August (the cheapest version is $4,900!) according to this New York Times story (registration required):
The aim was to generate a buzz among Vertu's most likely customers, members of a rarefied market segment that Ekaterina Walsh, an analyst at the consulting firm
Forrester Research , who studies high-net-worth consumers, calls ''splurging millionaires.'' Of the four million millionaire households in the United States, Walsh says, 41 percent tend, to one degree or another, to spend beyond their means. (Vertu's surest audience, Walsh confides, is the 3 percent of millionaire households that she characterizes as ''high-asset delegator splurging millionaires,'' with assets of more than $2.5 million, little interest in managing their own money and an inclination toward self-indulgence.) ''If any technology product were to be marketed as a luxury product, the cellphone is it,'' Walsh surmises. ''A large number of millionaires aren't technology savvy, and the cellphone is an established, unthreatening technology. Everyone has one. Vertu doesn't even see itself as a technology company. Pretty much all the splurgers among millionaires will be interested in a luxury phone. Vertu's timing is perfect.''
While the market for these luxury cellphones may be small, the idea is to get prominent celebrities adopting the Vertu thus encouraging, by association, other consumers to spend maybe an additional $10 for a fancy new Nokia phone.