The target market for Vertu isn’t people like Trump, who have people to do things for them. (Tony Blair famously never learned to use a mobile phone while he was in power because he had somebody to make the actual calls for him, he just had to hand over the phone.) It’s people who have enough money to travel a lot but not to provide 24 hour PA cover. Why the designs are so tasteless I have no idea, but the underlying product is a virtual PA system.
Seriously rich people wouldn’t regard a phone as a status symbol, a yacht is a status symbol. The people who blow $20000 on a diamond-encrusted iPhone are people who want to be seen as rich in their communities, but for whom $20000 is a lot of money.
For Trump, it’s backward; his status symbol is having his name on an hotel or a golf club. In his view of the world, he is the status to which others aspire.
