Brands that tap into people’s deepest desires make strong lasting connections with those people. Deep desires most often come from a feeling of lack but can also result from seeking a place of safety, peace or comfort. The following are deep desires into which brands can tap:
The opposite of trading up is not trading down. In fact, there is no opposite of trading up; shopping behavior is more nuanced than that. When shopping hit the skids after the financial crisis, there was a lot of talk about a new normal of frugality, as if the only thing possible after a decade-plus of trading up was a generation to come of nothing but trading down. It’s clear now that those prognostications were...
What consumers fear most nowadays is not failing to reach the top but tumbling down to rock bottom.
Future circumstances, already manifest and surfacing, will demand something wholly new of consumers, and thus of marketers, too, something more than a clever new look to rehab an old approach.
Direct marketers have long known something that brand marketers haven’t: responsiveness counts. And not much else.
