What High-End Home Brands Can Learn From Luxury Social Media

Borrowing a page from their playbook may help improve your game. Affluent consumers have a wide variety of passions – jewelry, fashion, art, cars and wine, to name a few – but one of their universal favorites is the home.  As a result, high-end home brands have a unique opportunity to connect with customers and […]

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Owning vs. Experiencing a High-End Home Brand

Why you should consider an experiential luxury strategy for your brand.   Several years ago, I was working on brand strategy with my clients at Viking Range. The philosophical question on the table was this: Is a giant stainless steel Viking an end unto itself – or a means to an end? Are we asking […]

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Does Your High-End Home Brand Stand for Too Much?

Your brand may have huge aspirations, but your consumers will have the final say.  Every brand wants to live large in a consumer’s mental landscape by laying claim to the biggest brand promise possible. For instance, plenty of high-end home brands would love to “own”  the kitchen. They represent categories as diverse as major appliances, […]

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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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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 Brands: Understanding the Psychological Symbolism of Home

When high-end brands touch timeless, universal human emotions about the meaning of Home, a deeper connection is possible.   All too often, internal discussions about marketing start and end with product features and benefits. Manufacturers tend to define brands solely by their engineering or design, without taking the time to discover the underlying psychological relevance […]

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Clickers vs. Converters Among High-End Home Brands

Make sure your measurements match your goals.   The young marketing team for a high-end home brand was reviewing the analytics for the company’s latest digital ad campaign. The campaign looked great, and as best they could tell, the ad units were generating a decent level of click-throughs to the campaign landing page. If the […]

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What High-End Home Brands Can Learn from Mapping the Customer Experience

Understanding the path to purchase can make you a more effective marketer.   The customer path to purchase is a fascinating journey. In the high-end home category, where prices command a premium and purchase cycles are inherently long, the path to purchase can be filled with equal parts anxiety and anticipation for consumers. That’s why […]

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More Affluent Consumers Are Haggling for High-End Home Brands

If product features cascade downward, might shopper behavior cascade upward?   I’ve always bought into the luxury marketing theory that product features launch at the high end and cascade downward to the mass-market. For instance, the in-dash navigation system once found in a Lexus has cascaded down to a mid-market Toyota. The Asian popper appetizer […]

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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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