Walking the Talk: Is author-journalist Malcolm Gladwell’s tipping-point premise reaching its own tipping point? Maybe. Most recently, Atlanta-based marketing research firm Yankelovich Inc. served up a statistical take on Gladwell’s now widely embraced notion that it takes a relative few mavens — people with a love of knowledge and desire to spread it — to spark a trend that accelerates rapidly, like Manhattan’s East Village denizens who rejuvenated the aging Hush Puppies brand into one connoting cool.
In its Jan. 12 Monitor Minute, Yankelovich notes nearly one-fifth of consumers, or 19 percent, tell more than five people outside their household about products or services they passionately like or dislike. These people, dubbed “talkers” by the researcher, tend to be younger, have higher mean annual household income and are slightly more likely to be female than “nontalkers,” those who tell fewer than five people outside their household about things they intensely like or dislike. The talkers have a mean age of 42, median annual household income of $56,900 and 53 percent of them are women. The nontalkers, by comparison, have a mean age of 45, median annual household income of $48,900, and 51 percent are women.
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“In an era when no one wants to listen to traditional marketing messages, talkers bring new voices to the effort,” said Yankelovich president J. Walker Smith. Still, Smith cautioned, “If marketers try to make word of mouth a systematic marketing tool, they may bleed the life out of it. And the talkers have to have something interesting to say.”
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The chief reason talkers themselves are a promising target market, Yankelovich reasoned, is their desire to be in-the-know, which makes them more likely than nontalkers to shop for new products and services and to prefer brands that keep them on top of new trends, like Panasonic’s plasma flat-panel HDTV or Apple’s mini iPod. In fact, Yankelovich found, 40 percent of talkers like to try new products before other people, against 31 percent of nontalkers; 30 percent of talkers place importance on being recognized as people having the inside scoop, against 24 percent, and 71 percent of the info-sharing cadre are always looking for new ways of obtaining knowledge, against 65 percent of their quieter counterparts. — Valerie Seckler
Craving the Luxe Life: Look for luxury consumption this year to go increasingly experiential, as consumers expect to revel in various adventures and indulgences, enjoying the emotions those activities evoke. The bad news for the apparel business is that the affluent crowd anticipates partaking of luxurious experiences more than purchasing high-end products. So says Luxury Report 2004 from Stevens, Pa.-based Unity Marketing. Spa spending, for instance, surged by more than one-third, or 36 percent, in 2003 versus 2002, and the momentum for such indulgences is expected to build this year.
“Luxury is no longer about rampant materialism,” observed Unity Marketing president Pam Danziger. Rather, she added, it’s more about “the way luxury purchases reflect one’s values and attitudes.”
The year-end 2003 poll of 422 people, with annual income topping $100,000, further found: Affluent consumers feel “considerably more positive about their financial status,” compared with a year earlier; high-end electronics were the most widely purchased luxury in 2003, mirroring 2002, and for most luxury consumers, brands are “very important” in only three categories, fragrance, cosmetics and automobiles. For all other categories, less than half of those polled rated a brand as playing a very important part in their last luxury purchase decision. “I’m completely confounded by the way affluent people think about luxury brands,” Danziger said. “It goes against all we assume — and what luxury brands tell us. There may be a subconscious awareness of certain brands.” — V.S.