Dinner for two.

Five hundred dollar dinner for two, seemed a lot at the time but it was for a best friend's 30th Birthday and the event seemed to warrant grand gestures. It was intriguing, it was hedonistic but most of all it was the idea of feasting on a fifteen course dinner that made me feel special, like a George Clooney character on the French Riviera. I have dined out on that dinner story many times and often added the analogy of one hundred $4.95 lunch time pizzas arriving at my desk to show what else I could have spent the money on. The pizzas are pedestrian but the Birthday meal was memorable on several levels and as such, changed my thinking on what I was likely to pay for regular products in the future.

I already pay more now for ordinary things, such as jeans, technology, haircuts, Thai food, after shave and breakfast cereals. I pay because I am buying ideas, notions of what could be, what might be and along with the changing perception of luxury becoming more about personal pleasure and self expression, it raises my purchases above just status. It's that feeling a product can somehow change you, give you the idea that you have raised your level of consumerism to connoisseurship.

Right here many people are replacing connoisseur with wanker but it's not just happening at the high end of town. We have long ago decided to become connoisseurs of coffee, hand held technology, designer t-shirts and bottled water. Ubiquitous items all, cheaply available, yet we continue to purchase at a high price because we see ourselves as different when we engage with these products. On purchasing, we then seek recognition from kindred spirits in the know about why the purchases were made, connoisseurs in designer jeans.

Apple has been one company very successful in selling ideas over product and able to gain leverage over their competitors and charge a premium. Steve Jobs was insightful when talking about not selling a product but selling what it could do for you, "it is not the customer's job to know what they want", he said. Which can be seen in products like the iPod, where we didn't know we wanted to carry our entire music collection around in our pocket, until Steve sold us the idea.

This was not a notion that held sway fifty years ago, when R&D departments used to design products to fill a need. A solution to that need was found, produced, likely copied and commoditised and sold at the lowest price. Marketing guru Ted Levitt used to regal his students with the tungsten carbon quarter inch drill which people didn't really want, what they wanted was a quarter inch hole, which could be produced with any old drill. It would be a long time before people started buying water in a fancy bottle because the idea of drinking Perrier or Fiji Water was satisfying a need to feel special, to feel like a connoisseur.

A recent purchase of a pair of expensive Ted Baker jeans was an example of what I am now prepared to pay when I already had other jeans in my closet. Yet the Ted Baker jeans made me feel like aging rock star Paul Rogers of Bad Company, still good enough to successfully front Queen. That's an idea worth paying for.