Something is happening to what we perceive as a Brand.
Our constant desire to up-grade and get better is starting to look a little bit silly. Just a thought, but there seems to be one hell of a lot of well known brands that are in real trouble. Be it Aston Martin’s or Harley Davidson’s – there are dozens of ‘great’ brands that are dieing.
And yet my 13 yr old daughter just received delivery of a pair of UGG boots, which I was assured that they are well worth their money (for avoiding pester power at least). I adore my iphone and religiously follow how the latest news on how it is going to improve and get even better, try to take it off me and fear the consequences.
So is the Brand dead?
In truth, it’s a mixed bag of winners and looses – as it has always been, now we all just seem to be a lot more canny as to what we really are prepared to follow and pay more for.
Here’s an article exploring this subject further:
Happiness not Luxury
Analysts and pundits constantly make the mistake of assuming “luxury consumption” “trading up” or “trading down” are consumer behaviors. In the United States, from the consumer perspective, luxury consumption is against the (cultural) law. Luxury consumption and trading up (or down) never happen from the consumer’s perspective. In other words, nobody willingly engages in luxury consumption or trading up. Those are terms crafted by analysts who purport to explain why consumers do the strange things they do.
What consumers do engage in is all matter of crazy rationalizations and justifications for their unnecessary (and what analysts would term luxury) purchases. Thus millions of us convinced ourselves that we might someday need the power of massive Range Rovers or SUV’s to navigate our daily commute to work—or that we need to spend $100 on children’s shoes. In all of this, we surely convinced ourselves of the product’s utility. We also mumbled something vague about safety or quality. Likewise, we may have thought to ourselves that we were rewarding ourselves, or treating ourselves, but most importantly we were not spending luxuriously. Outside of a very small subset of fashion conscious folk, conspicuous consumption has never been practiced.
Is the Brand dead, or does the Brand live on – just reincarnated even more rapidly than before?
Rob Ward
www.foodmarketingnetwork.com
