I can indeed speak about how to sell Gucci to the good folks living in the ghetto, considering where I both grew up and continue to live.

Simply convince everyone there that the product being hawked is the "in" thing to own or dress in. Then convince them that certain colors or versions of those products have since gone "out of style," necessitating the purchase of new ones every few months, since the style you looked "cool" wearing a few months earlier will now make you look "out of step" with "the times" (you, as an advertiser, must make sure that styles and tastes change every few months to keep people spending). Despite how poor many people in the ghetto are, you can rest assured they will spend almost every last penny they make to purchase these new items, since we are conditioned to believe that image means everything.

Also important is to try and convince people that the older, discarded versions of the product will someday be worth lots of money, and they will be even more likely to purchase it as a planned future investment. There is nothing more lucrative for a company than to get a good speculator market going on whatever their product happens to be.

A good example I remember during my later high school days and early college days was a colorful type of watch that was referred to as a swatch (does anyone else here remember the enormous but short-lived popularity of the swatches in the late 1980s?). My best friend at the time used to spend vast amounts of his meager paychecks on the latest style of swatch to come out every few months, which did a lot to divest him and the many other ghetto-living folks who were caught up in the craze during its roughly two years of great popularity of their earnings. It was extremely important to him and others to keep "in style" by dispensing with the swatches they spent a fortune on every time a new colorful style was introduced on the market, and then spending another fortune (for them) on the newest version. When I told him that I felt there was no reason to keep constantly buying new styles for what amounted to social pressure, he simply reminded me that people in his 'hood would make fun of him for being "out of style" if they saw him continue to wear a formerly popular style of swatch whose "in" status had gone the way of the dinosaur a few months earlier. He would also repeatedly mention how much he insisted that the old, discarded versions would someday be worth.

All of that reminds me of the out-of-control speculator market that took over the comic book industry in the early 1990s and nearly devastated it within a few years. All you had to do was tack a "#1" in the upper left hand corner of a comic book cover, and a vast number of buyers--a huge portion of whom had minimal to no interest in the book in question, or even comic books in general--would purchase sometimes multiple copies of the book in droves, hoping the fact that this was a first issue would mean the book would be worth a fortune several months to a few years later. I remember, for example, how huge the sales of Thundercats #1 was back during that era, and how far the sales and popularity of the book had slumped by its third issue--it was by then considered a flop despite the huge sales of its first issue, which buyers bought by the truckloads simply because it was a first issue, which had foolishly caused Marvel Comics and many comic book store owners to think the book was and would remain a hit. Probably the most frequent question I would be asked by the relatively new comic book collectors during our discussions of the subject back then was, "How much do you think [...]#1 is going to be worth?" Soon the comic books with various gimmick covers, multiple editions of books with hugely popular "special event" story arcs (the most notable of which was perhaps "The Death of Superman" storyline of 1992, followed by two big sequel story arcs, "Funeral For a Friend" and "Reign of the Supermen"), and the same book with multiple different covers all entered the scene. Consequently, everything was a disaster when the speculator market finally crashed, and the industry reverted back to having its customer base consist of those of us who bought the comics solely because we enjoy reading the stories and love the characters.