The Rich Are Very Different. Rodeo Drive is host to the world's most expensive retailers and the most affluent shoppers. It is a high-ticket Fantasia where money is no object and the mantra is: If you have to ask how much it costs, you can't afford it.

There, Battaglia is, foot for foot of selling space, one of the most expensive menswear stores in the world. The premier salon for the Brioni line, the suits begin at $3,500 and go up to five figures. Brioni is, of course, the tailor who suits James Bond. Shirts begin at $750, and two Stefeno Ricci ties can set you back a grand and change. Silk boxers at $125 are the least expensive clothing item in the salon.

On entering, the customer sinks into the ultra-plush carpeting. Every footstep feels expensive. Rosewood display cases and walls of mirrors reflect the elegance of a bygone era. The aroma is of wealth and power. Battaglia's consumer is very select indeed.

Established by Dr. Giuseppe Battaglia, the man credited with introducing the classic Italian style to America, the store has been on Rodeo Drive for more than 40 years. Battaglia has been clothier to the most famous names in Hollywood, from Fred Astaire to Adolph Zukor for more than a quarter of a century. But by the late 80's the source of their fame and fortune had become the cause of their decline. The old Hollywood was dying out, literally and figuratively.

For the first time in its history, Battaglia realized that it was going to have to actively pursue new clientele if it was going to survive. They brought me in to help them do that. When my agency, SMART opened for business in 1986, it was one of the first agencies to devote itself exclusively to the practice of selective marketing. Battaglia, Rodeo Drive, became its first client.

First we had to learn more about who Battaglia's customers were. We began by monitoring the floor traffic. In four hours, only nine customers entered the store. However, the total sales for those nine customers was in excess of $38,000. But who were these people, and where could we find more of them?

The two most elusive audiences in America are at opposite ends of the consumer spectrum: the homeless and the megarich. But what they have in common is their primary mode of communication: word of mouth. Battaglia's––and hence, SMART's––target market, affluent men with assets of $1 million or more could not be researched via the standard focus groups or mall intercepts. Millionaires don't do phone surveys, nor do they respond to questionnaires.

Retail outlets and product franchises that cater to exotic or specialized clientele must pursue new entrants to that customer base, and not depend on word-of-mouth marketing. SMART had to find another way to track these elusive consumers. Fortunately, the answer was right at our feet, for Beverly Hills and its surrounding area has made the care and feeding of the rich, famous, and beautiful its raison d'être.

First we identified 25 "encounter points“ in Beverly Hills, Brentwood, Bel-Air, and Malibu where the wealthy congregate. Places they wait for their cars to be brought to them. Places they dine. Places they have their nails manicured. Places they frequent after a rough turn on the polo field. We dispatched five handsome, well-dressed actors, each to an appropriate encounter point, equipped with voice-activated micro-cassette recorders They were instructed to small-talk their way into getting the answers to four questions we had determined to be essential to profiling this market.

Not only did we find out which age groups and professions had the highest level of awareness of Battaglia, we found out why the new movers and shakers of Hollywood were passing the store by.

As if protecting some small corner of their world that was being taken over by younger versions of themselves, the old guard in Hollywood wasn't sharing their sartorial secrets. You have to be inventive with the rich because the more difficult a market segment is to reach and research, the more critical the information is to the selective marketing process.

Our encounter point "interviews“ revealed that older money and newer money had vastly different perceptions regarding what constituted quality. Old money defined quality as something gained over years of experience and an intimate understanding of how things are made. New money trusted product claims of quality, or relied on peer endorsements and style trends. To the new money, quality was Armani, Versace, and Polo. To the old money, it was Brioni and Saville Row. The question was: Could SMART successfully interest new-money consumers in an old-money retailer.

We initiated a second round of encounter point surveys to find the answer to this all-important question. And the answer was what we and Battaglia hoped: Not only were members of the new Hollywood interested in learning from its predecessors, they were eager to learn.

So do yourself a favor if you're stalking the big bucks game. Never depend on one encounter with these people to give you the insight you need to reach them. Go back for more. And so we did––four more times to be exact, before we believed we had enough insight into our targeted millionaires and their buying preferences. We also came to understand what Battaglia meant to the men who already shopped there.

Battaglia had become an informal "club“ of past and present "influencials“ in the entertainment, energy, legal, medical, and financial fields. It was upon this concept-circle of influencials that we established the foundation to build our selective marketing strategy for bringing Battaglia into the next century. This was a primary secret of the Rich and Famous.

One point our unorthodox research efforts made clear to us was that our newly rich target audience believed the previous generation was "holding back“ information about how the affluent lived and how they judged quality. Thus, the strategy we devised was the following: Convince next-generation affluent men that there is a level of quality in men's furnishings that is above and beyond the level they currently perceive as best––specifically, a level of quality that can only be obtained at Battaglia, Rodeo Drive.

It was a daunting challenge. Delivering Better Than the Best, while searching for the best approach to delivering better than the best, Battaglia's wise and urbane general manager at the time, Alfred Chan, provided the agency with a dusty file full of photos from the fifties and sixties from Dr. Battaglia's archives. Each picture was more incredible than the next. There was a young Guiseppe Battaglia with Yul Brenner, Nat King Cole, Gary Cooper, Clark Gable––the big guys––taken at Hollywood social functions, Beverly Hills penthouse barbecues, summer homes in vacation spots all over the world. Still other photos showed these icons as they shopped at Battaglia's. Cooper buying a tie. Nat King Cole slipping into a vicuna coat. Billy Wilder being fitted for a tux.

A Picture Is Worth a Million Words and so our first recommendation was to enlarge the best of the photos of the stars shopping to 23x36 sepia-tone framed prints and display them prominently in the store, to bring Battaglia's glorious past into the present. Although this was only a cosmetic change at the point of sale, traffic in women shopping for their husbands and boyfriends did pick up. This was a fact SMART was quick to capitalize on, for often the key influencers for up-market men are their up-market significant others. We had learned that when focusing on a specific audience, don't overlook their significant others who might be shopping for them.

SMART recommended building upon the "better half“ of Battaglia's target market by restaging the Battaglia designer fragrance Essenza Por Huomo. At the time, it sold for $55. per ounce. We convinced management to raise the price to $100 and to support the relaunch of the fragrance with marketing efforts directed toward the women intimates of our target men. Our advertisement headline said it all: Battaglia Essenza. The one scent worth millions.

Run in the publications geared to new money, such as Los Angeles Magazine and the Show Biz trades, Variety and Broadcasting, the signature cologne positioned the signature shop on Rodeo Drive. It gave people unaware of, or previously too intimidated to do more than window-shop, Battaglia an excuse to enter the store. SMART was also well aware that often an entry-level product can engage an adjacent segment of a target market, which can later or concomitantly be developed for expansion. The strategy worked. Women bought Essenza for their husbands or boyfriends, who subsequently came in for their refills. The new millionaires began to discover a new level of quality in men's furnishings––a level better than the best.

Once we had succeeded in positioning Battaglia as "better than the best,“ it became imperative to distribute this message to additional print media that would reach those who could afford better than the best. Every select market has what SMART referred to as a "perceptual mindscape,“ made up of decision-making references based upon shared group values, acquired data, and personal criteria. From this mindscape, all new information is noticed, filtered, evaluated, and embraced or discarded. The process can take years or moments, depending upon how, when, and where new information is presented.

Although Los Angeles Magazine boasted the largest number of up-market men in its readership, more than two-thirds of its circulation was well below Battaglia's targeted income/net-worth levels––a lot of wasted readership to pay for. SMART searched for new publishing ventures that were also trying to reach this elusive market. In evaluating publications for possible positioning of print ads, our criterion was service. Could the publication provide information compelling to the up-market male audience? Could the publication offer a service important or essential to our up- market audience?

After subjecting several publishers to such analysis, we settled on the house publication for the Equestrian Center's indoor polo season and a hard-cover magazine called the Gold Book that was distributed in the suites of the finest hotels in Beverly Hills, Century City, and Bel-Air, as well as the capitals of Europe and Asia. (Upscale hotels proved to be an excellent entry point for additional national and international sales. It was a cost-effective way to initially expand a market without having to purchase media in multiple locations. Hotel publications also have a longer shelf life and high pass-along ratios. Furthermore, the placement of the book in high upscale hotels served as an audience prequalifier, ensuring that the reader was in the demographic we had defined for our target customer.) The Gold Book afforded Battaglia the opportunity to begin to form a long term one-to-one relationship with national and international clientele.

SMART was not above using the considerable clout of Battaglia's media budget to influence the editorial policies of those publications that we decided met our service criterion. When a publication has a circulation of less than 1 million, we never accept the so-called separation of advertising and editorial, because, as everyone knows, advertisements pay the salaries of the editorial staffs of such publications. SMART never let the publishers forget that.

Once we had the editorial cooperation of our chosen media, our next step was to create a yearlong calendar of store-based events to give editorial Battaglia-related events to cover on a regular basis. This "events calendar“ was given four pages in the Gold Book.

In the spring, we helped arrange for Dr. Battaglia to receive an award from the Italian government for his 30 years of service in promoting the classic Italian style of menswear in America. In the fall, we staged a celebrity charity fashion show featuring Patrick Wayne, Lalo Shifferin, Ricardo Mantalban, and Larry Hagman, hosted by Battaglia's former stock boy George Hamilton. Proceeds from the clothing sold during the show were donated to the American Cancer Society's Children's Fund. Sidney Poitier, Charles Bronson, and Sid Shinberg were just a few of the celebrities in attendance. The event was covered by CNN and NBC as well as Women's Wear Daily, M, and Esquire. The Equestrian Center Polo Book ran the photos for an entire season.

But the most important aspect of the event was that it gave the new Hollywood a chance to rub shoulders with the old Hollywood in a venue where the torch could be graciously passed––which was, after all, SMART's marketing challenge. Old-world Service via New-World Technology To celebrate Battaglia's 25th anniversary on Rodeo Drive, Battaglia unveiled a Brioni suit created by Alfred Chan. Needless to say, this was no ordinary garment; the suite was made of cashmere, and featured 24K-gold pinstripes. The tag, $100,000. This was at the height of the go-go eighties, and the suit was featured in articles in both the Wall Street Journal and Barron's. Six of the so-called one-of-a-kind suits were ordered by the end of the year.

Battaglia had once again become the menswear store by which all others were judged. We had succeeded in capturing our select market––the new millionaires. SMART followed up by helping Battaglia design a computerized database of every customer that came in the store. This gave Battaglia management and sales staff instant access to their customers' preferences, as well as to their complete size information for all garments and accessories. Once a customer was entered in the database, he could place an order from anywhere in the world and have it filled and shipped immediately. In addition, when Mr. Chan made his biannual buying trips to Milano, he could take up-to-the minute data on which sizes to order. This new customer satisfaction system gave the Battaglia sales staff the ability to develop in moments the kind of insight that had previously taken them years to acquire––and that the next-generation millionaires had come to expect in their high-tech lives. Investing in a computer tracking system also meant that as he volume of Battaglia's business increased, the perception of personalized service that made the store "one step beyond the best“ did not have to be compromised.