‘Class’ or ‘mass’
Introduction
Victorian Bournemouth (258) considers how the colony’s early marketing anticipated today’s luxury consumer brands. Both shared a dilemma about expanding their appeal to wider audiences. This dichotomy reflected a deeper issue affecting Bournemouth society during the nineteenth century.
Victorian Bournemouth (258): prestige
Top people
A study of luxury brand marketing offers parallels to how Bournemouth’s earliest entrepreneurs conceived, positioned, and promoted the settlement. Strategies used by luxury brand owners often depend on such concepts as desirability and exclusivity. They create an aspirational lifestyle intended to absorb its audience by using prestige as an emotional gateway. These concepts share some associations that surrounded spa society. This form of social gathering grew in popularity during the early nineteenth century. Attendees at these centres formed an exclusive, nomadic group which rotated around the growing network. Only the rich could participate with regularity. Spas offered an alternative location to aristocratic houses where such groups would cluster before drifting elsewhere. A social imperative developed. Attendance at spas became a necessary qualification for inclusion among better people. Lists of current visitors published by local newspapers exerted a hypnotic appeal. The need to attend resembled a modern-day luxury brand’s emotional summons.
Smoke and mirrors
Despite their imagery, most luxury brands consist of a tangible item. The purchaser can see it and touch it to earth the offer within the electricity of its subjective associations. This physical relationship provides reassurance about perceived value. Destination marketing, however, provides an intangible service. It uses aspirational imagery to capture the experience of attendance. Actual use of a resort’s facilities, exposure to its local myths and traditions, however, can provide a tangible element. Early Bournemouth, however, consisted of a few buildings squatting on an isolated beach, beside an endless heath. It had no history. Its offering consisted of a temperate climate and gentle sea breezes. Nothing else existed. Early marketing used an interesting approach to solve this possible limitation. Media coverage emphasised the resort’s instant success. As luxury brands would do, it used the concept of fashionable exclusivity that shimmered with urgency: a successful place for successful people.
Victorian Bournemouth (258): expansion
Prestige or profit
The search for more volume will bring luxury brand owners to consider reaching wider audiences. Moving outside their original target group, they sell to different social types who may share a taste for aspirational improvement. Such people have stepped onto a social escalator travelling upwards. Dangers abound here, however. Increasing popularity and a wider presence can reduce a brand’s sense of exclusivity and prestige. Without care, a valuable franchise can become invalid. During the Victorian period, this process affected domestic tourism. Wider railway availability and legislation opened the way for working people to travel on holiday. To local traders, the number of these travellers had considerable commercial appeal. A danger arose, however, in the possibility of alienating privileged visitors. Established sites, for example, Bath and Brighton, maintained their original focus on the gentry. For such new sites as Bournemouth, a temptation arose to cater to both types of visitors.
Hoi Polloi
The anniversary of Queen Victoria’s coronation became a public holiday. Bournemouth commerce benefited from this occasion very early. The press reported day-trippers coming to the settlement from nearby towns. People found the prospect of a day in Bournemouth more exciting than staying where they lived. This provides an early index of the resort’s attraction. It seems implausible that such visitors all belonged to the same social position as Bournemouth’s early visitors, those who had created the town’s glamorous aura. On occasion, debates in Bournemouth suggest commercial attempts to appeal to those who wanted black-faced concerts, beach activities, and noisy celebrations. The train’s arrival laid the way open for such a transformation. Strong resistance occurred. Ranks closed to keep the beach free of such people. Press editorials pondered the best way forward. Some saw the Undercliff Drive to Boscombe, an old chestnut, as a method of retaining the desirable ‘carriage people’.
Victorian Bournemouth (258): tourism, the essence
Tourists the priority
During the Victorian period, examples appeared in the local press to indicate how much Bournemouth’s leading citizens valued tourism. Early on, they strove to win selection as the site for the National Sanatorium. This had a perfect ‘brand fit’ with the resort’s convalescent credentials. The label of ‘National’, however, brought Bournemouth to the country’s attention. The Improvement Act (1856) included permission to erect a pier. Despite setbacks, the town persisted with building this valuable tourist attraction. Constant attention to improving the drainage and sanitary infrastructure occurred, in part, to protect tourism. Outbreaks of cholera, while bad for residents, could have killed the visitors’ trade. In the 1890s, the Town Interest Association made a clear statement about Bournemouth’s priority. They had to ‘bring before the Town Council any improvements for the better entertainment of our visitors and the general welfare of the borough’. Thus, visitors had priority over residents.
Social structure
By prioritising visitors over residents, this statement contained a dichotomy. Expressed over a century after the colony’s establishment, it reflects not only marketing but also social policy. The struggles and concerns about positioning the external offer (‘mass’ or ‘class’) also haunted the social battle to control the town’s internal affairs. The commercial success which occurred during the early period enabled middling people to become an important component of local society. They looked at a horizon which included constant development and improvement. Trains. Cultural activities. Absorbing the hinterland. Borough status. Against them rallied those leading prestigious and leisured lives, the gentry who had become residents. They wanted stasis, Arcadia, a resort for the elite. Thus, they wanted the original luxury brand before it spread beyond its social boundaries. What may have appeared at first as a marketing strategy doubled as a recipe for the town’s later social structure.
Takeaway
Victorian Bournemouth (258) examines how the town built its reputation and developed in ways that resemble marketing strategies used by today’s luxury brands. Both faced challenges about the scope of their marketing efforts. Yet, beyond these marketing concerns, deeper questions about Bournemouth’s underlying social structure emerged.
References
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