The best of the best

March 1, 2008

Bruce Deachman

Premiumization. It's a bit of an absurd word -- the addition of a pair of suffixes to turn a noun into a verb and back into a noun again -- used by non-English-major marketing types to describe the specious trend of making products more upscale, or at least make them seem more upscale, and thereby parting more of the money from the fool.

Yet there it is -- premiumization -- not anywhere in the Oxford English Dictionary, but listed by Trendwatching.com as second among the eight leading trends expected to make great inroads in 2008.

It's not a new idea. Starbucks and its ilk have been premiumizing coffee for years. Grey Goose vodka has been hyping its particular upmarket version of that largely colourless and tasteless product for even longer. Meanwhile, consumers have more recently been weaned off inexpensive wines and teas in favour of more tony brands with catchy names.

What's new for 2008, says Trendwatching.com, will be the "premiumization of everything and anything."

"In other words," it promises, "no industry, no sector, no product will escape a premium version in the next 12 months."

The premiumization of bottled water is already well underway. Evian's Palace brand, available only in high-end bars and restaurants, features a specially designed pouring spout and comes with its own stainless steel coaster.

Bling H2O, meanwhile, is packaged in limited-edition, corked and frosted-glass bottles "exquisitely handcrafted" with Swarovski crystals, and bills itself as "gourmet" bottled water. The inspiration of Hollywood producer and writer Kevin G. Boyd, who observed that one could tell a lot about a person by the bottled water he carried, Bling H2O, according to its website (blingh2o.com, where it can be purchased), "is strategically positioned to target the expanding super-luxury consumer market. It's couture water that makes an announcement like a Rolls Royce Phantom -- the 'Cristal' of bottled water."

"But it's not for everyone," the website warns, "just those that Bling."

(Cred alert: Kevin G. Boyd wrote three episodes of The Jamie Foxx Show in the late 1990s, and followed that success with single episodes each of TV's Girlfriends, Fastlane and One on One before, presumably, noticing a dearth of $480 bottles of water out there.)

And how we got this far without Tasmanian Rain bottled water is a mystery. Billed as being "captured from the purest skies on Earth" and collected "just minutes from where the World Meteorological Organization records the world's purest air," this bottled water never touches the ground. Even God's own tears, we assume, aren't quite as clean.

And on it goes. Beer, honey, chocolate, home appliances, pet foods, cars, baby accessories and candles (Acqua di Parma's Design Candle Collection sells for about $130 per candle and promises "an innovative collection of perfumed candles and a unique blend of form and fragrance; these home design objects are composed of the purest ingredients and crafted using age-old artisan techniques") are all getting the premiumization treatment. Even toilet paper (in designer colours, including black) and marshmallows (luxury marshmallow-makers Dean & DeLuca offer a one-pound "sampler" for $28) have become luxury goods.

Yet, a little further down Trendwatching's list of the Big 8 for 2008, at No.7, we find "Make-it-Yourself," which for years has included such digital content creation as movies, pictures, blogs and music. The approaching trend here, however, is expected to be one whereby companies will allow consumers to digitally design their own products online, and then have them actually made for them.

What Trendwatching doesn't address, though, and what would be interesting to discover, is whether these two trends -- premiumization and make-it-yourself -- might be combined. After all, not everyone can shell out $5 for a bottle of Tasmanian rainwater every time a thirst beckons, let alone nearly $500 for crystal-encrusted aqua-bling. And while everyone's tush surely deserves the pampered luxury that only black toilet paper can provide, at $3.25 a roll it can cut a mighty swath through the weekly grocery budget.

But why do we need someone else to provide us the best water, marshmallows and toilet paper? Why not simply cut out the middleman and make them ourselves? We tried a few, and believe the results speak for themselves.

Bottled water

For only $4.99, or about 21 cents a bottle, you can purchase 24 bottles of Loblaws' President's Choice-brand water. True, there's nothing particularly upscale about drinking Loblaws water; Hollywood's elite would surely have nothing good to say about it. But does it taste any better or worse than Evian, Labrador, Aberfoyle Springs, Montclair or Naya, let alone Tasmanian Rain? Not likely.

The key here is to make your water the holiest, most righteous water on earth. Or, more accurately, to convince yourself that it is. To this end, we've simply redesigned the label, replacing President's Choice water from Feversham, Ont., with Tears From Heaven water, wrung daily from only the best fair-trade and morally upright angels in the entire holy firmament.

Toilet paper

Try as we might, we couldn't think of a way to colour an entire roll of toilet paper without turning it into either a wet, pulpy mass (as with food dyes) or something as comfortable to the derriere as corrugated cardboard (as with, say, spray paint).

Instead, we adopted more of a Martha Stewart approach, purchasing a beautiful rubber stamp from Michaels crafts store, along with a stamp pad, and stamping a red palm tree onto each square of tissue. Yes, this takes a lot of time, but the sheer uniqueness of it all is worth the effort, and the bright accent it brings to your bathroom is, well, a good thing.

Beer

Sure, everyone knows that imported Belgian beer Stella Artois tastes better than Bud Light, but what do you know about the difference between a Hoegaarden and a Fix?

The former, also from Belgium, is the most expensive bottled beer listed at the Ontario Beer Store, clocking in at $13.15 for a six-pack of 330-ml bottles, or about $6.64 per litre. Fix, meanwhile, is the beer store's cheapest, with six 341-ml bottles of this Muskoka brew demanding only $7.50, or about $3.67 a litre. You do the math; the Fix is almost half the cost, and no one's tried either (although everyone knows Hoegaarden is an expensive import).

And so we buy one Hoegaarden and peel and scan the label. After printing numerous copies, we simply affix them to the Fix bottles. And after drinking three or four, we're convinced it's very good beer indeed.

Computers

The laptops that are all the rage these days aren't the ones with the fastest DVD burners or largest RAMs or clearest, loudest speakers, but rather the ones that look as though they walked out of a fashion magazine -- bejeweled and fur-trimmed contraptions that might have been designed by a Hollywood writer. But they cost tens, even hundreds, of thousands of dollars, impossibly out of our range.

The solution? Go faux. For a mere $16.98 at our neighbourhood Fabricland, we found a metre of the most irresistible and plush leopard print imaginable. And after an hour or so with some scissors, tape and glue, we are the envy of the entire world (wide web).

Electronics

OK, it's difficult to fake a flat-screen, hi-def TV using just orphaned buttons, uncooked macaroni and glitter glue. But imagine the power that will surge through your body as you channel-surf with your solid gold remote control. If you have enough gold leaf left over after premiumizing your remote, you could cover your entire TV console. Even reruns of Murder, She Wrote will take on the lavish patina of grandeur, and you will know you have finally arrived.

 

 

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