Part Two · Strategy · Section 08
Audience and demand
The audience is bounded and the inventory is unbounded, and this asymmetry is the heart of the model.
The buyer is a chief executive, founder, entrepreneur, or high or ultra-high net worth individual, based in Australia. This is a small and reachable audience.
Bounded
The audience
The brand needs to be known in one country. The Australian pool sets the size of the audience to reach.
Unbounded
The inventory
The revenue it earns carries no such limit. The revenue is drawn from each customer’s global charter spend, so the ceiling sits far above the domestic market.
The inventory is global. An Australian customer charters in the Whitsundays this year and the Mediterranean the next, and both bookings run through the same broker. The audience is bounded and the inventory is unbounded, and this asymmetry is the heart of the model. The brand needs to be known in one country. The revenue it earns carries no such limit. The Australian pool sets the size of the audience to reach. The revenue is drawn from each customer’s global charter spend, so the ceiling sits far above the domestic market, and a modest brand budget aimed at Australia can support a large revenue line.
The category’s entry points
Demand is built against the moments that bring the category to mind. A charter is considered at a milestone birthday, an anniversary, a family gathering across generations, a corporate retreat, a season on the water, or the entertaining of important clients. These moments are the category’s entry points. Mental availability, developed in Section 10, means being the broker that comes to mind at those moments. The work of the brand is to attach itself to them, one by one, in the memory of the audience.
In market now, and later
At any moment only a small share of the audience is ready to charter. The rest sit outside the market today and enter it in a future season. Category research, from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, puts the in-market share at roughly 5 percent at any given time, with the other 95 percent out of market for now. That research measured business categories, so the exact split for luxury charter is unknown and the ratio stands as illustration, though the shape holds: most of the audience will buy later.
This governs where the effort goes. Advertising aimed only at the 5 percent ready now reaches a thin slice, and in this category that slice is thin twice over, because brand demand barely exists (Part One). Building memory against the entry points reaches the 95 percent ahead of their moment, so the brand is already known when a person moves into the market. The strategy weights towards that larger future audience, and Section 10 sets out how.
The purchase is considered and built on relationships (Part One), so the audience meets the brand many times before an enquiry. The brand earns that enquiry through presence and trust accumulated over time.