How Emotions Evolve in the High-End Home Brand Purchase Process

Smart brands work to maximize joy post-purchase.   Your consumer has finally decided that it’s time to update the kitchen, redecorate the living room, or replace the floors downstairs.  As many marketers of high-end home brands know, the purchase cycle for an expensive home-related product could be six months to a year before she finally […]

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High-End Home Brand Media Consumption: A “Both/And” Proposition

Affluent consumers enthusiastically consume traditional and digital media.   Marketers of high-end home brands had to make difficult decisions during the economic recession. When revenues fell, so did marketing budgets – and that often meant that media was dramatically cut. More than once, a CMO told me that they were facing a sort of “either/or”  […]

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Beyond the Purchase of High-End Home Brands

Buying decisions continue to be made after the actual purchase. Marketers of high-end brands understand Plato’s description of emotion and reason as two horses pulling us in different directions. After all, it can be painful when you’ve carefully helped a customer along the path to purchase, only to have her return the product the following […]

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Down But Not Out: How Affluents Shop for High-End Home Brands

You know the story, but do you know the lessons learned from it?    Prior to the global financial crisis, affluent consumers spent above their means, in large part due to phantom-like perceived wealth. “Their housing values were going up and their 401k’s were going up, so they felt wealthy and tended to spend above […]

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High-End Home Brands Still Command the Lion’s Share of Category Profits

Marketers who understand the 20/40/60 Rule are more likely to raise their returns.   Michael Silverstein’s seminal book, Trading Up, made a significant impact on my marketing worldview by documenting how companies create high-end brands that appeal to affluent and mass-market consumers. The book was – and remains – a great business case for the […]

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Launching Your Brand Upmarket

A picture is worth 1000 words. But credibility is worth much more in sales.   For the past several months my Ramey team and I have been working behind the scenes to help launch an innovative new of line cookware – Hestan NanoBond. One of the most exciting facets of this launch was collaborating with both our client […]

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Cooking from scratch: Upward Home interviews Eric Deng, Hestan

Editor’s Note: We are excited to launch a new series of interviews with some of the leading voices in the high-end home industry. Today we visit with Eric Deng, Co-Founder and President of Hestan Commercial Corporation, who is shaking up the culinary world with the launch of Hestan Commercial, Hestan Outdoor, and Hestan Indoor. Chris […]

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Can Your High-End Home Brand Triple Sales in Two Years?

How the mindset of one CEO might affect marketing directors across the home category.   The CEO of a high-end home brand was visiting with me about revenue and profit trends at his company. We had talked about some of the inherent challenges facing his brand. On one hand, his brand was the category leader. […]

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A Surprisingly Effective Targeting Strategy for High-End Home Brands

  Tenure of affluence can be more important than net worth.   Many home brand marketers have found success targeting affluent consumers who own a second home. The reasoning is that if your brand is an expensive consumer durable with a 10-15 year lifespan, then regardless of how loyal your customer is, it may be […]

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Consumers Are Shopping High-End Home Brands via Mobile

Do you understand how consumers are shopping your brand?   More and more consumers are using mobile devices to shop for home-related brands. And since one of the top-five purchase categories for smartphones is the home, you would expect that home brands would finally get into the game. The short answer is that some are […]

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