Marketing professor Thomas O'Guinn heads up the Center for Brand and Product Management at the University of Wisconsin's Business School, and he says he is seeing signs of "angry populism" in his research. With the economic downturn, and unemployment climbing, there may be a backlash against luxury goods, or at least against flaunting expensive items. In an article for Advertising Age, O'Guinn looks back to marketing campaigns from the 1930s to answer the question, "What's a luxury, big-discretionary-bucks brand to do?": In the Great Depression, the smart brands were very clever in the way they used Americans' ambivalence toward wealth. As the late historian Roland Marchand noted, smart advertisers pointed out that "even rich people have the same problems as you." He called this the "democracy of affliction." The smart Great Depression advertisers humanized the wealthy; they made them sympathetic characters with problems to which anyone could relate. They made even expensive brands about something, anything, other than wealth. They made their brands about commonly shared goals, problems, frustrations, values and community, not an I-have-mine-sorry-about-you arrogance. Remember, Americans love rags-to-riches stories. Other advertisers of the 1930s used this popular narrative to create brand stories about "breaking into fine society," making their brand part of your hope to fit in with the social strata above you and actually making it. The idea was inclusion, never exclusion. So, nuanced aspiration appeals are fine, but the sensitivity and humanity has to be there. The sweet spot seems to be sensitive value through things we share. Read the whole article here .