Where are consumers headed next? It’s a question almost all of us have asked.  Brands that get the answer right often win, and brands that get it wrong find themselves playing catch up.  In recent months, Iconoculture has developed a series of roadmaps to help marketers shine a little light on where their target consumers are going.  To get there, we look at the challenge from a couple of different angles:

Categories: How will consumer behavior change in a given category?  What are consumers migrating away from?  Where is their attention (and wallet) headed next? (think media, technology, home, health, food, finance, etcetera)

Segments: How are the needs, motivations, and behaviors of specific demographic and lifestyle groups changing?  What do demographic groups have in common?  What makes them unique? (think Moms, Millennials, Xers, and so on)

Based on these perspectives, we’ve laid out where we see consumers headed in a series of “state of the union” summaries organized around the two lenses, categories and segments.  We call these overviews Consumer Outlooks—our one-page stories of where consumers are headed next.  For Council members, we’re providing a selection of these outlooks on our site to inform your strategy setting and hopefully spark a few new ideas.  Check out the Consumer Outlooks for North America here:  Segments, Categories; and get a preview of our new global Consumer Outlooks here: Global. Read More »

Tragedies like the natural disaster in Japan often bring out the best in people. Occasionally, an event of this magnitude brings out the best in a brand as well. If a brand can use its reach, resources, and the captivity of its audience to help connect consumers to a cause that ignites their passions (or compassion) all involved can benefit: consumers, brands, and the cause at the center of the ecosystem. Read More »

Catchy title, huh?  I must admit I stole it from two good friends, Jeff Yang and Kate Muhl, here at Iconoculture.  They’re going to be diving into a handful of the cultural, political, and market differences between China and the U.S. in a few weeks at our Iconosphere 2011 event in Miami.

As Iconoculture members ask us for insight into the changes their marketing strategies will have to undergo to compete in (and with) China, here are a few of the most common questions we hear brands asking:

• Where do the aspirations and values of Chinese and American consumers converge? How can brands take advantage of these convergences for a competitive advantage?
• How do consumer perceptions of our national “brands” differ?  What do Americans think of China? What do the Chinese think of America? What does this mean for the next era of “Made in Chimerica” brands?  (I’ll leave that term to Jeff and Kate to explain)
• What realities will brands need to embrace as we face a new, multipolar power equilibrium?

All big questions that our brands will need to answer to confidently tackle competitive and increasingly international markets.  We’ll explore each of these in a few weeks at Iconosphere.  If you’re interested in learning more, MLC members can check out the details at Iconosphere 2011.  We look forward to seeing you there.

In the mean time, MLC members can check out the “Latest Iconoculture Insight” link on the Global Insights page for some of Iconoculture’s latest consumer observations from China.

As consumers continue to grow accustomed to new economic realities, are their definitions of convenience changing as well?  Evidence cropping up across markets suggests “yes”.  In just about every category, marketers have witnessed consumer interest shifting from the convenience we buy to convenience we try to engineer into our lives.  For many consumers, a simpler, more practical, and even less expensive lifestyle is considered a badge of honor—at what other point in American history could the staycation be considered stylish?

While changing views of convenience are clearly rooted in economic retrenchment , it doesn’t mean that marketers who appropriately cater to changing needs and attitudes can’t profit from the new definition of convenience—Netflix has certainly done so, and redefined competition in their category along the way.  While the Netflix example is well into the mainstream, dozens of novel approaches are cropping up in unexpected places.  My new favorite: the Acme Party Box Company (I’m not kidding).  Everything that comes in the economically priced box can be reused around the house, composted in the garden, or seamlessly transitioned to the toy box.   Simple, practical, and complete with Moroccan-themed favor bags, should they fit the bill.  What’s the point?  If products and services can really deliver convenience, consumers are still willing to open their wallets for practical, right-price simplicity.

(At right:  Acme’s Woodland Party Box. From that, to economic retrenchment to Netflix – we’ll cover it all in New York on February 25^th.  You can’t make this stuff up.)

Iconoculture has pegged consumers’ changing views of convenience as one of our six Big Ideas for 2011.  Interested in hearing the other five? MLC members can join us in New York on February 25^th for breakfast and we’ll walk through all six ideas, as well as what’s working for marketers who are in tune with the Big Ideas and one step ahead of the other guy.

Big brands are often the last to catch on to changing consumer behavior.  There are few industries where this is more visible than airline travel, where frazzled consumers have long begged the major players to deliver an experience that exceeds the “punishment for a crime you did not commit” bar.

Iconoculture recently reported on an unsettling trend in consumer travel—as airline innovation fails to keep pace with consumer demands, consumers are either rewarding smaller players like Suite Arrival (who delivers TSA-friendly personal items from popular brands directly to travelers’ hotel room) or inventing their own “DIY” approaches to make travel less frustrating. Read More »

Everywhere we look, there’s evidence that consumers are a little more skeptical, a little more cynical, and sometimes even a little angry. While these consumer sentiments are widely recognized by marketers, many brands continue with the feel-good aspects of their message: family, friendship, security, trust, and even hope.  At the same time, Surly Brewing and Angry Little Girl totes are migrating from niche to mainstream with a different message—you’ve got attitude, and we understand that. Red Tettemer illustrates the approach perfectly in Tub Gin’s recent campaign:

One of the sharpest subversive ads of the year (a humble opinion) is available at http://www.tubgin.com/, and click on “A short, short story”.

These brands offer just a few examples of a broader trend in tapping directly into the edgier, snarkier sentiments of today’s consumer (Whitney had to tell me what snarky means).

Iconoculture—MLC’s new partner for bringing real-time consumer insights to our members—has picked up on this trend in its most recent research on “Subversive Branding.”  Iconoculture’s findings point marketers in an interesting direction: while subversive branding can breathe new life into our marketing messages, it also runs the risk of alienating consumers. Read More »

When we started exploring innovation from a marketing perspective a few months ago, Andy Armstrong left a copy of Baked In: Creating Products and Businesses that Market Themselves by Alex Bogusky and John Winsor on my desk—a fantastic read on market-driven innovation.  I was only a few dozen pages into the book when I hit a particularly insightful piece of guidance:

“Make a list of the cultural trends that influence your consumers’ behavior.  Take your time; all of the items on this list will not be immediately apparent.  Stay with it, and you will gradually observe more and more.  Be a good observer.  Remove yourself from your own cultural perspective.  Look for the absurdities, the incongruities, the things that don’t necessarily make sense.  You will begin to laugh as you start to see the culture from the outside.  (Laughing is a good sign).”

Bogusky’s hypothesis underpinning this advice is simple: consumers are participants in a culture first and an economy second—they’re much more likely to spend their hard-earned dollars on culturally relevant products than culturally ambivalent products.  If a brand wins the cultural relevance game, they’ll likely see the economic benefits as well. Read More »

The case for better Sales and Marketing alignment is pretty obvious to most Marketers—selling and marketing in concert stands to yield much better results than doing them each independently.  Unfortunately, what actually leads to good Sales and Marketing alignment has eluded most of us for a long time.  We’ve been collecting data on the topic for a few months now, and have come across a couple of admittedly simple but thought provoking findings: Read More »

As marketers try to get their companies back on a path to growth, bets on innovation—be it product, service, or other—are top of mind for most of us.  Unfortunately, when we ask how approaches to innovation are changing in 2010, most marketers default to a “more” strategy—more spending, more experiments, or more time and attention.

As we begin to dig around for some new ideas, Council members have pointed us to an emerging trend: their best ideas are coming from outside the walls of their companies, or at least outside of traditional marketing and R&D functions.  “Outside-the-walls innovation” generally shows up in one of three flavors: Read More »

As followers of the Chinese Zodiac prepare to usher in the year of the tiger, marketers appear to be ushering in the year of the re-org.  Having seen their markets soften, crumble, and begin to show signs of life—all in the last 18 months—marketing leaders are rethinking the organizations they’ve built.  Even if the basic structures we’ve built appear to be viable, new segments need to be addressed and  new teams need to be formed to address markets that look very different from the ones that we faced just two or three years ago.    

Unfortunately, many of the marketing reorganizations that will kick off in 2010 will take a year or two to implement.  Right around the time that key players settle into their new roles, teams start to gel, and new processes start to fire on all cylinders, market conditions will have changed, and it will be time to start all over again.  Read More »