Feature – Luxury Incentives

Article - Andrew Cook, director of sales at leading prize promotion specialist, Unmissable, explains how luxury means different things to different people, but one definition all would agree on is that the word ‘luxury’ stands for something out of the ordinary to help promote your product or brand!

1. What’s new in luxury incentives for 2005?

New experiences are surfacing all the time and over the last 12 months there has been a noticeable shift in people’s desire to focus on improving their lifestyle. With more and more pressure at work and stress levels continually rising, it’s no longer purely about accumulating material possessions but more about making the most of what little social time we have.

As a direct result of this shift in attitudes, more lifestyle experiences have been developed and are becoming increasingly popular, such as:

• Concierge Service - Having a concierge for a month to take care of all your chores like dry cleaning, grocery shopping, cleaning the car, cleaning the house, looking after the garden.
  
• Home Delivery - We can arrange for anything from champagne to flowers to chocolates to be delivered to your home every week for a year.
  
• Design Consultation - Have a professional designer come to your house to redesign your garden
  
• Celebrity Chef - Get a celebrity chef to come to your house to host a dinner party
  
• Ultimate Duvet Day - Spend the day in slumber whilst a professional chef comes to your house and prepares a gourmet lunch for you. After which a masseuse will pop over to take all the stress out of your aching limbs.

These are just some of the experiences, which have proved popular in recent months along with getting a new wardrobe, personal shopping trips and going to movie premiers, which continue to remain a big hit.

2. Are luxury incentives only for the ‘big boys’, promoters with money to burn?

Not at all - as outlined in the synopsis of this feature, luxury can be defined as “something that is out of the ordinary”, therefore ‘luxury’ doesn’t always have to be measured in monetary terms, the key is to provide a solution which is innovative and has a high perceived value to the potential recipients.

We have proved time and again that with some lateral thinking and utilizing our extensive network of contacts there are plenty of opportunities for promoters with smaller budgets to offer a wide range of luxury incentives.

3. What are your minimum order/headcount requirements?

We take pride that one of our core strengths - and one of the main reasons why clients keep on using us again and again - is our ability to provide our clients with a flexible solution to sourcing prizes and incentives.

To ensure this flexibility is maintained we don’t place restrictions or handcuff our clients with minimum levels of spend or numbers, ensuring that regardless of their budgets or headcount we are always in a position to provide our clients with innovative solutions.

4. How do you tailor your offering to match the needs of your clients? What extras can you offer such as custom branding and the like?

Our bespoke approach ensures that any solution we provide will not only be representative of the brand and the theme of the incentive, but will be created with the intended target market in mind. If the rewards themselves are not inherently of interest to those people to whom the incentive is aimed then the scheme will fail before it’s even begun. A lack of interest in the reward will equate to a lack of interest in the incentive program, individuals need to be motivated by what’s on offer to them, a tailored approach will go a long way to delivering the required interest levels and ultimately ensure a greater potential for success.

From time to time our clients need our assistance with additional services such as:

• Images - For use on marketing material communicating the incentive
  
• Branding - To provide our clients with an opportunity to re-enforce the brand after the incentive has finished we have previously branded products ranging from table footballs to computer game consoles to mini fridges.

Once our clients have the prizewinner’s details, we can save them valuable time by handling the fulfilment process on their behalf, including all prizewinner liaison and distribution. In addition to which, we provide clients with feedback from the winners, which provides them with invaluable management information from which they can evaluate the success of the incentive.

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For further information, please contact:
Jane Lowen, The Press Office, 01580 764721
jtlowen@aol.com