Discovering business opportunities

Zahid Adil, Strategic Marketing & Brand Consultant at Thinkmor™ . He is one of the top 10 MarketingProfs experts, recognised by its strategic marketing knowledge and professionalism. The company he works for – Thinkmor (London, UK) has 45 years of combined experience, most from well known brands or corporate backgrounds, working together to help B2B & B2C companies in Services, Retail, NPD, Fashion, IT to deliver higher profits, streamline costs and secure future growth.
 

Thank you Zahid, for sharing your opinion!

How the habits of the luxury consumers are changing and how the luxury brands adapt to these changes?

Before addressing the habits of Luxury Consumers it’s important to briefly summarize the Luxury Brand perception over the last 50 years.
Traditionally Luxury Brands/Items were mainly bought by the Rich, Aristocratic and Royalty. Luxury was all about status and separation from the masses. Luxury used to be defined by brands such as Rolls Royce, Bentley, Yves St Laurent, Dior, Chanel, and even travel in the 1960-1970’s was seen as a Luxury. Luxury brands used to be rare and only accessible within controlled channels.

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 Howard R. Moskowitz is president and CEO of  MOSKOWITZ JACOBS INC. . Dr. Moskowitz is both a well-known experimental psychologist in the field of psychophysics (the study of perception and its relation to physical stimuli), and an inventor of world-class market research technology. Among his important contributions to market research is his 1975 introduction of psychophysical scaling and product optimization for consumer product development. Whereas these methods are standard and well accepted today, they required a massive culture change in the 1975 business community. In the 1980’s his contributions in sensory analysis were extended to health and beauty aids. He has also developed and refined procedures which enable research to interrelate products, concepts, consumers, experts and physical test instruments, in order to accomplish product optimization and reverse engineering. Finally, his research and technology developments have led to concept and package optimization (IdeaMap), integrated and accelerated development (DesignLab)), and the globalization and democratization of concept development for small and large companies alike, in an affordable, transaction-oriented approach (IdeaMap Wizard; IdeaMap.Net).
Dr. Moskowitz developed the notion of RDE or research developing experimentation. RDE comprises easy-to-use Internet-enhanced experimental designs (similar to conjoint analysis), coupled with high-level, automatic analyses. RDE reveals what messages synergize to produce exceptionally strong performance, and what messages either work with each other or do not work with each other. RDE further segments people by their mind-sets, using direct responses to messaging, thus making segmentation immediately actionable.

He is autor of the book Selling Blue Elephants, awarded with Best 30 Business Books of 2007 Excellence Award by Executive Book Summaries.

1. How to understand the mind of the consumer?  What are the major tendencies in this area?

The big problem here is the drift of market research towards two areas. The first is tracking studies. These studies don’t tell you much. The second is observational research or ethnography. These are in-depth, but too expensive.

I favor experimental design of ideas, where you mix and match ideas, present these as test concepts to consumers, get ratings, and identify what works. If you do this properly you learn a great deal about the algebra of the mind. I have written books on this (see my website www.SellingBlueElephants.com – go to ‘about the authors’, and see the ‘books’. You have a table of contents. The books and chapters dealing with concepts go into this area of understanding the customer’s mind.

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 Gianfranco Chicco, Marketing Director at HSM Italy, (World Business Forum, the Annual meeting for the business community), specialized in strategic planning, alliances with media partners and associations, online strategy, partnership agreements and development of new events. You can find his blog here

Thank you, Gianfranco, for sharing.

 1) What is the importance of the brand today? Have it lost from his power?

Brands (as a concept) haven’t lost their power, how could they? What happens is that in the last 5 years or so, in most mature market-driven economies, there’s been a strong power-shift back to consumers. Some brands have resisted, others have disappeared or lost its fancy, and a bunch of new ones have jumped to stardom. Even a “no-logo” is a brand. I like Kevin Roberts (www.saatchikevin.com) classification of brands according to two axes: Love and Respect. This representation of brands creates 4 basic groups:
+ Love and – Respect: fashion brands with a short but intense life
 - Love and + Respect: most brands lay here, especially some classic ones
 - Love and – Respect: commodities
+ Love and + Respect: a lovemark! (www.lovemarks.com)

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