The premature death of premiumisation

Or, the true price of buying nice things

Every few months, adland declares something dead. This week, it’s premiumisation.

Apparently, people no longer buy on quality or aspiration, only on vibes. But here’s the thing: that’s bollocks.

And it’s exactly the kind of bollocks you believe when no one in your office earns under £80k.

The real world has a weekly ledger. The average UK adult sits around fifty quid on food, forty on entertainment, ten on alcohol and tobacco. That’s not a mood board. That’s a budget.

It covers 68% of the country, the middle mass, the two‑thirds who feel the price of a pint and the price of pasta on the same day. You drop a sixteen quid steak or eight pound plastic bottle of hot honey into that weekly basket and something else has to comes out. And one third of UK adults are already skipping meals to make ends meet.

Premium is not a treat for most of the country, it’s a swap.

This is where the industry keeps kidding itself. The distance between a keynote and a checkout belt is funded by class. Only about 19% of adland is from working class backgrounds, while fee‑paying schools make up roughly eight percent of the wider UK, people from less privileged backgrounds in marketing are a minority. It’s a full scale briefing error waiting to happen.

You can see the fantasy leak into pricing. In my inbox this week: twelve fruit beers for seventy four pounds. One and a half times what a typical adult spends on food in a week, the same price as one hundred and five 440ml cans of Bud Light from Sainsbury’s.

That’s not broadly accessible beer, it’s a premium brand built for people living one standard deviation and beyond from the mean of income. If that’s your ambition, fine, own it, model it properly, stop pretending you’re building for everyone. Every time you say it aloud you sound as ridiculous as Lambo claiming the Urus is an affordable family car.

The neuroscience is rude but useful. Preference activates the brain’s reward system, while price pain shows up in the insula. At the moment of decision, those signals fight. If you’ve had a career that turns prices into abstractions, the pain signal dulls and you start believing the story is enough. It isn’t for people who know how much overdraft they have left to last the week. Not at the shelf, not at the till.

So let’s stop trying to bury premium and start telling the truth.

There are only two honest plays in any category: price or differentiation. If you can’t own one, you’re in the beige mid, and the beige mid gets delisted.

Premium survives because people still make sacrifices for things they value. That’s the core of it. Not vibes. Value. Build your brands, prove your purple leather interior with contrast stitching is an optional extra worth more than it’s price tag to the 13% who can afford it.