elitism and pricing
The question of elitism in business is an interesting one. Interesting because it’s paradoxical, to say the least. The only reason why we don’t say that the term business elite is an oxymoron is because there is still room -although rapidly shrinking- for the elite…also in business.
The purpose of business is profit. Profit provides context for the behaviour for all players in a business organization. Ultimately the drive for profit determines the decisions concerning both resources and people. To put it in a different light, profit replaced principle as the foundation of one’s actions (be it mental, emotional or physical).
It not difficult to see that profit is fundamentally a quantitative factor. Since quality never originates from quantity, qualitative factors like leadership and value have been “adjusted” to the business setting, which resulted in absurd beliefs like “everybody is a leader”, which is essentially the almost open denial of leadership itself. It would come as absolutely no surprise if the next school of “management thought” openly propagated that leadership doesn’t even exist, and tried to prove from an increasingly inferior context, that it actually never existed.
Leadership is intrinsically elitist. It is not born out of profit driven initiatives.
- everybody recognizes the elite; in a business setting however the general attitude towards them is hostility. The foundation of the behaviour of members of the elite is respect
- from the point of view of profit driven players the context that determines behaviour is money in its various forms, including revenue, compensation, fees, cost, profit etc.
- from the point of view of the elite money is symbological. It symbolizes value in its various forms, be it quality time, focused attention, differentiation. The behaviour itself is not dependent on monetary considerations, the purpose is not the creation of profit.
With the exception of design, domains of mass production leave little room for elitism and value. Heute Cotoure in fashion, wine or other noble drink creation, food creation, hand made objects etc. maybe the only area in the product domain where elitism could still persist (although these “objects” no longer maybe considered as products in the conventional sense) as long as it doesn’t comply with dominant tendencies that are typically referred to as fashion or fashionable.
If design stays above fashion, it is timeless and such timelessness reflects the style elements of superiority. This is the solution to the “break-through paradox”, and the true foundation of luxury “brands” (the term luxury brand of course is an oxymoron, since luxury means unconditioned, thus superior; brands are driven by the mass, the most conditioned thus inferior factor of all).
In the service domain superiority comes from the vantage point above best practices, thus from an inferior point of view it is always dangerous; it is not dangerous because of the vantage point itself, since the higher doesn’t exclude the lower (meaning that best practices are well known, and better understood by the elite than those who just learned them and use them); the danger comes from the integrity of the elite in that they don’t sacrifice the superior for the sake of the inferior.
When members of the elite -horribile dictu - deal with each other, be it in the service or the product domain, value gets appreciated, which is reflected in the price that is agreed upon – in a way given- and not negotiated.
Trying to “talk down” the price of an elite service or product is an inferior effort.
This can’t be avoided, given that the inferior can’t comprehend the domain of the superior (if it could it would not be inferior), thus it can’t appreciate it.
In the business domain leadership may only come from the elite and it is crucial that the elite maintains relationships with each other in order to maintain the reality of leadership, values and in the end, quality.