Expertise

Because consumers have changed and these changes are bringing changes to marketing models, set ways in which advertisers and brands communicate, in which media & advertising also innovate.

• Today all marketing, communication and media has to run on the moment, in real-time.
• anticipating, catching the zeitgeist, the mood of the day, what will derive desires and appetite for the new.
• The moment of truth where brand and its offer are of outmost relevance in consumers' lives, citizens' lives, be it to:
  • Change its perception, opinion, behaviour.
  • Buy into it
  • Make it his/hers
  • wish-list it
  • become its follower or active advocate.

• Icon status and luxury iconic codes have long been copied by more mass-market products, brands and offers.
• We are more than ever enticed to, dared to up-grade, trade-up, seize exclusive, tailor-made experiences. Sectors as diverse as FMCG, high-tech, hygiene, DIY… borrow without batting to the lingo and codes of luxury.
• Luxury is dead… long live luxury as it has always been in a position to raise its game, innovate, raise the experience bar to new heights.
• There is a polarising factor, where luxury needs to (and does) reinvent itself constantly.  With differentiating offers,  with renewed experiences and services, leaning on their know-how, craftmanship and heritage.  Building on identification and affiliation factors.  And investing and innovating on the continuing, seamless experience from digital to shop, from online to offline.  Shaping and reclaiming a unique, personal and personalized experience and scarcity of products & offers.  By this the luxury sector maintains a deep, wide and widening gap between its "realm" and the mass-market.

• Today retailers are facing many challenges. Consumers have more options than ever in the way they shop.
• The "one click away" generation expects, indeed often demands, easier access and pain free shopping patterns. Invisible commerce looms ahead.
• Brands are threatened to be bypassed by smarter intermediaries, artificial, but intelligent, that sometimes even go beyond consumers' freedom of choice and action by pre-selecting potential alternatives, what could or should address their needs and demands.
• Retailer are caught between offering an ever easier and more fluid and practical access to their products and the mandatory playful and engaging shopping experience, more immersive always more tantalising. Innovation is everywhere and impacts the way consumers discover and buy products from new renting habits, subscription offers to so-called sharing-economy and even to the now shoppable augmented reality and social media. Despite these massive changes in offers and buying pattern disruptors, price is still and maybe more than ever the key factor from which springs and ends each path to purchase. Without precluding, of course, the demands for exclusive experience and optimal level of service. Baffling challenges indeed!

• Traditionally baby-boomers have been considered the easiest age group to define: seniors!
• They represent stability, they are set in their ways… Really ? With more and more options and choices, with the expansion of life-expectancies, with better health, for a longer time, their world and possibilities have opened, wide. More and more brands are taking this astride and adopting a tone, a language, an editorial line more age-neutral, less divisive
• Born in the post WWII optimistic era, baby-boomers have also grown in the care-free 60's, with extraordinary evolution in mentality towards and possibilities for women and minorities. They knew that they were facing a brighter future than their parents did. And it more often than not, was the case. Even if today they are more worried about their own children in a world that seems more dangerous and insecure.
• Baby-boomers and their elders, despite all the challenges they are facing, represent a growing proportion of Europeans.
• In France baby-boomers and their elders represent 21% of all consumers, it is already 23% for the Riviera.
• But actual age is not necessarily the age we feel we have. We indeed enter a post-demographic age where your age alone does not define you anymore. Neither in the way we feel, nor in the way we live or consume or shop…

• Maybe the more daunting challenge of our post-modern society, reaching on as many sectors as it offers an infinite potential of opportunities and development.
• From a consumer's perspective it seems that the last decades with theirs cohorts of innovations, successes, failures and scandals, have left their mark. In the form of an increased defiance towards institutions, politics and even NGO and Brands. And even a feeling of personal powerlessness.
• But today Fairtrade shoppers, recyclers, up cyclers do not represent just a fad. They are but a sign that each action counts for a safer, preserved planet. For the consumer reconciling consumption habits and human values, doing the right thing without compromise may represent something of a bipolar, unachievable behavioural objective.
• And this is where the citizen-consumer puts on the pressure and lean on the brand to surrogate for their own conflicting desires: keep "having" while maintaining a high-morale profile exposable on social media. So much so that our consumption, the brands we patron have to be in a position to represent the shinier part of our persona.

• The scale and speed of change in technological development over the coming decades will continue relentlessly, its impact will spread across industries and sectors.
• More than ever we will rely on technology innovations to communicate to find and share information, and more than this, as a tool to help manage our lives or indeed as a "guru" to improve them or even us.
• Still we feel concern or defiance - for our privacy, mental wellbeing, job security - as a result of the rapidly changing environment, technologically driven, in which we live.
• The 3 keys of changes to come:
  • Automation,
  • inter-connectivity,
  • and more than ever Big Data.
• A potential disruptor in this relentless change: new regulations and norms, here and there, and the risk they may bring to harmonised systems if not thought of globally.