The Commoditization of “Premium”
If your brand or product relies on slapping the words “luxury” and “premium” onto PR campaigns and software tiers, you are suffocating under your own marketing fluff.
You cannot speak class into existence. Luxury is not a label printed on a box, and it is certainly not a keyword in a marketing deck. It is an operational state of mind.
I learned the actual mechanics of premium positioning at 35,000 feet, serving First Class.
The Felda Boy and the CEO
In the First Class cabin, there were always two distinct types of passengers.
First, the royal entourages and the newly wealthy. They were loud. They demanded every item on the menu. They watched the screens, drank the champagne, and occupied every inch of attention the cabin crew could offer. In modern consumer culture, these passengers are the equivalent of giant, shiny logos colonizing your attention.
As a Felda boy, I understood their behavior perfectly. When scarcity meets abundance for the first time, you devour it. You consume every single feature available to make absolutely sure you got your money’s worth.
Then, there was the quiet CEO.
The serial entrepreneur. The true high-net-worth individual who had flown this route a hundred times. He didn’t care about the caviar, and he never touched the state-of-the-art entertainment screen. He ordered a single glass of water, opened his book, and went to sleep.
He was the class in the room, and no ticket price put it there.
The Absence of Friction
At the time, the Felda boy in me thought the CEO was wasting his ticket. Today, the UX Realist in me knows he understood luxury better than the airline’s own marketing department.
The CEO wasn’t paying for the lobster. He was paying for the absolute absence of friction. He was paying for the privilege of isolation.
In business, being quiet is the ultimate luxury. It means the system is working so flawlessly around you that you do not have to raise your voice to get what you want.
This is exactly where modern founders and product leaders fail. When they want to make a product “premium,” their default instinct is to add more. They add more features, more dashboard widgets, more onboarding pop-ups, and more “bespoke” touchpoints. They build the software equivalent of the loud royal entourage. They force the user to consume everything just to justify the subscription price.
The Final Moat is Quietness
As AI makes it cheaper and faster to generate infinite features, content, and code, “more” is rapidly becoming a baseline commodity. Anyone can build a bloated app and call it premium.
True luxury in the modern business era is not about how many features you can pack into a product. It is about how much friction you can completely remove from the user’s life. It is enterprise software that doesn’t require a 40-minute onboarding call. It is a service pipeline where the problem is solved quietly before the client even realizes it exists.
If your brand has to shout to prove its worth, it isn’t premium. It is just expensive noise.
P.S. At Majalah BIKIN, I write about human experience, UX, and business psychology — drawn from 30 years across airlines, banking, design, and the field. Read more and follow along.