Marketing to wealthy women: a report from The Luxury Institute

The Luxury Institute has released a new report into The Wealthy Woman, which you can download in full here.

But let’s pull out the highlights of this report, which surveyed women from households with $150,000 or more in annual income ($262,000 average income, $2.2 million average net worth):

First, The Luxury Institute defines the new ‘wealthy woman’:

• She’s educated, employed and controls the lion’s share of spending in wealthy households. Nine times out of ten, she is married, or living with a life partner. Her responsibilities often include a high-paid job or running her own business while also caring for a child or a parent.

Which are the brands she picks out as particularly noteworthy?

• Marriott, Hilton, Visa and Home Depot stand out for their skill in marketing to wealthy women. Each of these companies earned an unaided mention from seven per cent of respondents. American Express (five percent) and Remax (four per cent) each received frequent mention, as did Cadillac, Capital One, Lowe’s and Westin (each with three per cent).

So why is this important?

• Married wealthy women, on average, make almost two-thirds (64% ) of a family’s purchase decisions; 73% report making a majority of the household spending decisions.

World Fair Trade Day: Are UK consumers buying better?

It’s World Fair Trade Day today so we at Brand Strategy will be making sure we don’t consume anything but products that have been made and distributed in a fair way to all concerned. Although really we are still waiting for brands to make everything fairtrade so we don’t have to think about making a choice in the matter….

But while we’re waiting, let’s look at some research from the Fairtrade Foundation, which suggests that 70% of the UK population now recognises the FAIRTRADE mark, up from 57% in 2007.

Mind Your Avatars

Research agency Conquest has launched ‘Metaphorix’, a new online tool to measure unconscious emotional reactions to brands using online animations and avatars in its research process. Conquest believes this differentiation enables access to consumers’ gut reactions by bypassing the conscious mind.

David Penn Conquest co-founder comments: “Much current research is past its sell-by date. It assumes brand decisions are conscious, explicable and rational. In reality our behaviour and our response to brands is highly emotional. As consumers we say one thing and do another. Our behaviour is not logical, considered, conscious or easily accessed via standard questioning.”

While consumers are constantly bombarded with information, there simply isn’t time to think, says Penn, so emotions power much of our engagement with brands, and we use unconscious shortcuts to help us make decisions.

Metaphorix is designed to plug directly into how good, excited, desirous we really feel towards a brand, rather than rely on how we say we feel.  In this way, the tool facilitates measuring the warmth experienced towards a brand, the level of intimacy we feel with it, how empathetic we are towards it and how ‘cool and talked about’ we consider it is.

MySpace, Yahoo, eBay, Photobucket and Twitter get into data sharing; the future of online profiles?

MySpace has announced a partnership with Yahoo!, eBay, Photobucket, and Twitter to launch the MySpace ‘Data Availability’ initiative, which aims to ‘empower’ global MySpace users to share their public profile data with websites of their choice throughout the internet.

The system claims that this helps “open the doors to traditionally closed networks by putting users in the driver’s seat of their data and web identity.” It claims that this is the first time that a social website has enabled its community to dynamically share public profile information with other sites.

Unlike the Facebook system Beacon, which tells people’s online ‘friends’ what they are buying/doing online if users choose to leave it active, MySpace claims that this initiative puts the user in charge of their own data: “Users will have control over what information they share and who they share it with.”

The new scheme allows people to update their profile in one place and then share that information with the other websites in the partnership. The brand says this gives people the chance to
“manage how their content and data is made available to third party sites they have chosen to engage with.”

Inside this opt-in framework, they will be able to share:

(1) Publicly available basic profile information
(2) MySpace photos,
(3) MySpaceTV videos
(4) Friend networks.

So….what do you think of this new initiative? It’s certainly interesting. Do people want a way to use the same data across many websites? It’s a step towards making things easy for folks when they are using the internet.

But many people don’t wish to have the same information available to so many different websites and feel uncomfortable about this amount of information being shared between different corporations, even if they are in charge of managing it. Does this mean that personal data will be even more out of people’s own hands than ever before?

Any views? An attempt to make life easier for consumers or a way for corporates to gather ever more data on their users?

***UPDATE***

Facebook has joined the party with the launch of Facebook Connect, technology for members to connect their profile data and authentication credentials to external websites. It makes the company the latest social network to embrace data portability. It comes only a day after MySpace announced its data portability service.

Through Facebook Connect, members will be able to use their Facebook identities across the Web–profile photos, names, photos, friends, groups, events, and other information. Facebook profile content, for example, could appear on other social sites and so on.

Google has also announced Friend Connect, a data portability service or a sort of ’social network base’ taking some elements of services such as Ning.

Interesting times ahead!

A printing firm and a football club - a match made in heaven?

Our June edition will feature a special supplement on the theme of sport and branding including a profile of sports personality Kenny Logan, telling Brand Strategy all about his personal brand and the marketing agency he has established.

To explore the subject of sport and branding further we attended a dinner hosted by OKI Printing Solutions, sponsors of Portsmouth football club.

Ewa Johnson marketing director at OKI says the Japan office initially felt the decision to support the Pompey football club was “completely mad”.

But the choice to sponsor the team appears to have paid off. The FA cup finalists have provided a platform for the brand to increase awareness. A top half finish in the Barclays Premier League has also added to the positive publicity OKI has received.

The company has realised the benefits of getting to know the players and getting involved in the local community, rather than embarking on a badging exercise. The firm supports several community projects including The OKI Street Sixes league which offers young people the chance to play football for free every week to help motivate children and prevent anti-social behaviour. While this local involvement inevitably generates positive PR for the firm, the scheme was originally launched by Hampshire Constabulary giving the project a real gravitas.

It’s unusual for a business-to-business brand to sponsor a sports team. But with the likes of goalkeeper David James and striker Jermain Defoe talking about the marque perhaps the printer’s decision to sponsor a football club is not such a strange move after all.

A new business model for music videos?

We at Brand Strategy like to flag up nice business concepts that we come across and this week, we like IDST (If Destroyed Still True), a unit set up by Manifesto Film and director Sam Crack. The company aims to explore new business models in the music video market.

For example, as Crack explains in music industry publication Music Ally, if a single is only expected to sell around a thousand copies, it makes no sense to create a video that costs £20-40,000. IDST is looking into areas from product placement to Situationist-style ‘events’ that result in both music videos and viral footage for PR use.

The unit may be onto a smart idea. The most recent Sony electronics ad featuring people in Miami playing in a massive pile of foam got local citizens and extras involved in the shoot to use the brand’s products to record behind-the-scenes footage and still images that the company can now use in its marketing campaign.

Crack tells Music Ally that he thinks there is potential in forming longer-term relationships with bands than the usual one-video arrangement and creating tailored content for band virals.

An interesting idea? It’s good to see some new approaches to marketing music but will this work? Let us know your views.

How To Do Digital Luxury

Alex Charlton, director, Essential Research and Beth Uyenco, director of research, Microsoft Digital Advertising Solutions argue, in this exclusive blog article, that luxury consumers are ready for marketing 2.0 and explores how luxury brands can establish a credible presence online.

“For consumer brands the internet has become a given; a pillar of brand strategy. Brands have found a way to harness digital media and emerged leaner, more dynamic and with greater relevance to a vast new audience. Luxury brands however have been more reticent to meet the web head-on.

The inherent contradiction between the ubiquitous accessibility of brands in the online world and the fiercely protected exclusivity at the heart of luxury consumer goods has to date remained an unresolved mismatch. The sensory interactive experience of the Jaguar XF’s digital launch and Chanel’s recent video campaign featuring Keira Knightley as the iconic Coco Chanel are notable exceptions to widespread apprehension of digital by luxury marques, however our recent global research identifies significant risk-managed opportunity for luxury brand positioning and engagement in the digital world.

Consumer confidence takes more battering: GfK Index

UK consumer confidence has fallen as more depressing stories of economic gloom circulate and companies produce less-than-thrilling financial results. It echoes US consumer confidence, which has also dropped to the levels of 2003, just before the Iraq invasion. The GfK Consumer Confidence Index reveals that expectations in the UK for the next 12 months have hit the figure of  -38, twenty points lower than this point last year. The score has not been this low since 1992.

The climate for major purchases (homes, cars and all other big ticket items) has also worsened, spelling bad news for brands. It has dropped to -24, a level of depression not seen since 1990, when it was -25.

Last month, we looked at consumer confidence figures in more depth in our April 2008 to see how people felt about the economy in various countries, particularly the US and UK. We also chatted to Andy Thwaites, insight director at GfK Financial, which produces the stats for the European Commission.

Below, you can read an exclusive extract of our chat with Andy last month (be warned that the figures will now of course be surpassed by those newer ones mentioned above):

LG turn Scarlet with new ‘film’ marketing promotion?

Tomorrow night, the Brand Strategy team are off to the launch of the new Scarlet TV series, billed as the “new David Nutter project” and boasting a fabulous red-carpet launch reception event. While we’re obviously dusting off our sequined dresses and high heels for the bash, we hear a rumour on the grapevine (or CNN, call it what you will) that the whole shebang may be an elaborate ruse for LG electronics’ new range of TVs. In fact, the company itself admits it outright on its own website, so the secret is out. Are those sneaky marketing types trying to pull the wool over our journalistic eyes?

We’ll let you know how the launch in the UK turns out……..!!!! It seems like LG are keen to do something really interesting with its marketing and the scheme has certainly got some consumers talking about it online so it has clearly achieved some of its aims already……..

****UPDATE*****

So, we went along to the Scarlet TV launch and as expected, it was a very snazzy affair although many guests seemed somewhat confused about the concept - was it really a TV series? Oh, just a TV? Riiiiiiight…..

Sky has helpfully taken some showbiz snaps of the occasion which got a good turnout of minor celebrities including comedian Noel Fielding and singer Sophie Ellis-Bextor.

An interesting marketing concept no doubt, but what are your views? Do you think LG’s wordplay on the idea of a ‘TV series’ - literally a series of TVs - worked? It was certainly more interesting than most product launches and certainly got the brand a great deal of PR. But strategically savvy? You tell us.

Starbucks isn’t singing about Hear Music anymore?

We hear on the grapevine (oh, ok through the newsletter CMU Daily) that Starbucks may be cutting down on its music efforts. With the economy in a pitiful state and the brand confessing that its next results are likely to be lower than previously expected, it appears that non-core activities may be sidelined.

CMU reports:

“Ah, you see, coffee companies may be occasionally interesting in dabbling in
music, but when their share price takes a tumble all energies return to
getting that milk frothed, and the record label gets sidelined. Starbucks
has announced it is downsizing its entertainment division, and is
transferring its record label, Hear Music, over to its partner in the
venture, US independent the Concord Music Group.

The coffee chain has been dabbling in music for a while now, recognising
that coffee drinking consumers may be persuaded to buy carefully selected
and mainly classic artist CDs while getting their morning cappuccino. They
stepped up their music ambitions last year by launching Hear Music as a
fully fledged record label, and grabbed the headlines by reaching a deal
with Paul McCartney and releasing his album ‘Memory Almost Full’.

But with the coffee conglom going through a tricky time financially, they
announced yesterday that they were handing most of their music operations
over to Concord, while the company’s entertainment boss Ken Lombard will
leave the firm. They will still dabble in entertainment projects, though
they will be more digitally focused, shown by the decision to put their
entertainment department under Chief Technology Officer Chris Bruzzo.

It’s not clear whether the Concord managed Hear Music will still be able to
use the Starbucks café network as a distribution platform for selling CDs
and promoting downloads from artists signed to the label - that being at the
core of the whole venture presumably they will. Though Starbucks are known
to keen to do more book based promotions moving forward, presumably
recognising that customers may be persuaded to buy carefully selected books
while getting their morning cappuccino.”

*******

Is this the right step for Starbucks? Is this the time for the brand to be focusing on its coffee business rather than nice-to-have extras? Or should the company stick to its plans to build the brand into a lifestyle proposition rather than just a coffee-house chain? Let us know your views.