Trading Up Keeps Going With Rental

Trading Up Keeps Going With Rental Rodger August 15

Michael Silverstein wrote a great book “Trading Up: Why Consumers Want New Luxury Goods”, a description of the growing market of New Luxury items of $4 lattes, subzero appliances, premium liquors and varied other New Luxury items.

Quality plays a part in this exploding market, but aspiration is also a huge motivation.

There may always be a group of people that never wants to rent, usually the super-affluent.Â There will be some things too personal we will never want to rent.

The corollary to Trading Up is Trading Down, where you will trade down on goods that are of little importance to you, thereby you will trade down to generic goods, oft times of similar quality to more expensive brand name goods.

You can keep trading up in a great and growing number of high-end categories with rental: jewelry, handbags, high fashion, high-end cars, vacation homes, photography equipment, more.

There’s an occasional stigma attached to rental that equates it to trading down, using someone else’s dirty stuff.

But I also think that stigma’s really going to be starkly reduced, simply because thereâ€™s very little rationally that is too personal to be reused.Â Absent this stigma, rentals become very attractive to a great many people.

When it does, trading up may be well turn out to be the greater of the two motivators for choosing renting over buying.

- Rodger

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