How Brand Managers Should Use Humor

Humor is a surprisingly complex phenomenon. At first glance, it seems straightforward: something is funny, we laugh. But upon examination it turns out that humor and laughter play several roles in our lives, influencing the way we communicate with each other and how we see the world.

“First and foremost, humor is a disruptive force. The experience of laughter, especially unexpected laughter, jolts people out of their routine and creates heightened awareness. You’re reminded that the world isn’t exactly what you expect it to be,” says Karyn Buxman, neurohumorist and former president of the American Association for Therapeutic Humor, “so you pay more attention to what’s going on.”

Humor is particularly effective at capturing attention when it is appeals to the unconscious mind. In Carver & Scheier’s seminal work, Perspectives on Personality, we find that “Humor often rests on threatening desires or impulses that are transformed in amusing ways.” The longing to use ‘dirty’ or ‘naughty’ language manifests very early in our development — ask any first grade teacher, and they’ll tell you the most popular punchline ever is “Poop!” — and it stays with us for our entire lives. The Kmart commercials very deftly give people a way to enjoy the naughty impulse without any social consequences. That’s the comedy bulls-eye!

Finally, it’s important to understand that humor can be used to both capture and direct customer attention. Both commercials have, at their core, messaging about Kmart’s online sales and gas savings — areas where the brand has reasonable hopes of being a viable competitor. If enough shoppers associate the pleasurable experience of laughing at Kmart’s messaging with interacting with the brand, the chances they’ll give the online store a try themselves go up. After all, doesn’t everyone want to ship their pants?

Be A Better Brand Manager: The Essentials

Humor is not one-size fits all. What makes one person laugh may alienate another. The more robust and complete your understanding of your customer is, the easier it will be to create messaging that tickles your customers’ funny bone.

Be strategic. While humor is generally always welcome, it’s best used when it helps reinforce a specific marketing message.

Pay attention to your metrics when assessing what types of humor work best with your customer base. Humorous content tends to be among the most highly-shared content on social media in general, so make sure you’re making apples-to-apples comparisons (examining how one type of funny material works compared to another type of funny material rather than funny material compared to more serious content) when judging effectiveness.

August 17, 2013 by

Be A Better Brand Manager: Look Your Customers In the Eye

Eye contact is on the decline, according to the Wall Street Journal. There are several reasons why we’re not looking at each other as often as we used to: the ubiquity of smartphones, the rise of remote employment, and attention spans that have shrunk like a cashmere sweater in a hot dryer.

Adults are making eye contact between 30-60 % of the time, Quantified Impressions report, and our own field observations have revealed that the younger the adult is, the more they tend to skew toward the 30% end of the continuum. What does this mean for retail?

Eye Contact: Understand the Opportunity

Eye contact is a largely unconscious behavior. The majority of people seldom put thought into their decision to look another person in the eyes or to instead, look away. There are many cultural factors operating behind the scenes that influence how often a person initiates eye contact, as well as how long they’ll be willing to maintain that connection. Gender, social standing, community traditions, and even emotional states all factor into the eye contact equation.

Cognitive neuroscientist Simon Baron-Cohen has stated that eye contact provides information about the target of others’ expressions and clues about their communicative intentions and future behavior. This information enhances and augments any verbal communication we may have, making it easier for both parties in the conversation to understand each other. A shift in the culture that means less eye contact can mean less understanding.

One of the keys of being a successful cult business is developing a comprehensive understanding of your best customers. It’s essential that this understanding is possessed by people at every level in your organization, from the leadership team to the front line associates. Developing your team’s understanding of and skill with eye contact is a simple, no-cost way to promote that understanding. When your team uses their eye contact skills effectively, your customers will feel like they’re listened to and valued. This subtle touch helps drive sales, strengthen customer relationships, and can contribute to your customer’s decision to recommend your store to their family and friends. If the current eye contact decline continues, the fact that your team is committed to meaningful eye contact can even serve as an important brand differentiator.

It’s important to recognize that encouraging your team to make eye contact more often is not a one-time deal. Individuals throughout your organization will have differing levels of ability and comfort when it comes to establishing and maintaining appropriate eye contact. Integrating ongoing education and reminders into your regular staff communications helps keep your team committed to making meaningful connections with your customer base.

Be a Better Brand Manager: The Essentials

Provide your team with specific education regarding eye contact. You can’t just say “Make more eye contact!” As a rule of thumb, we should be making eye contact approximately 70% of the time throughout the conversation, for approximately 8-10 seconds at a time.

When dealing with a group of customers, it’s important to acknowledge each of them individually with eye contact.

Too much eye contact can be as problematic as not enough. When the gaze is held too long, it can feel invasive, even vaguely threatening. Be aware of cultural differences where eye contact is involved, and adjust your company’s practices based on your customers’ ingrained preferences.

August 13, 2013 by

Look! Up in the Sky! A Way To Make Your Customers Love You More And Increase Profitability

AirplaneFlyingIf you’re familiar with the tenets of Cult Branding, you’ve heard us talk about the importance of your Brand Lovers. Your Brand Lovers are the most valuable customers you’ve got—they shop with you more often than any of your other customers, they buy more per transaction than any of your other customers, and they tell their family and friends how awesome your business is more than any of your other customers.

Understanding who your Brand Lovers are, what unconscious psychological factors motivate their purchasing decisions, and providing them with the best possible service based upon that understanding is the best, most effective way to achieve Cult Brand status—that enviable place in the marketplace where you enjoy maximum profitability and competition is irrelevant.

The more Brand Lovers you have, the healthier and more robust your organization will be.  Understandably, smart companies go to extraordinary lengths to retain their Brand Lovers. This is the origin behind some of the most effective customer loyalty programs, such as airline miles rewards for frequent fliers.

Balancing Brand Lover Retention with Brand Lover Creation

Creating an effective Cult Brand, particularly in the retail environment, requires strategic thinking. What’s the best way to deploy your organizational assets? Rewarding your Brand Lovers enthusiastically  is one option, but companies that rely exclusively upon this strategy are placing a limiting factor on their success.

Hal Briekly, writing for the Harvard Business Review, illustrated this concept with an examination of the airline industry. Two percent of airline customers account for 25 percent of industry revenue; we’d characterize these fliers as Brand Lovers. The airlines reward this 2 percent with lavish premiums and high-touch customer service. The other 98 percent are treated as if they were a homogeneous, monolithic group.

But they’re not. Customer loyalty exists along a continuum. Customers who aren’t quite Brand Lovers might still prefer your company over the competition, just not as consistently. In the continuum, there are also customers who view all of the companies in your industry as veritably interchangeable, with no marked preference or aversion to any one brand. There are customers who don’t like you, but do business with you because they feel they have no other choice. There are customers who are vehemently opposed to your organization’s existence.

Your job as a brand manager is to know how many of your customers fall into each particular group. Briekly discovered that there were 18 percent of airline customers who weren’t exactly Brand Lovers still did quite a bit of flying. In fact, this 18 percent of customers—we’d call them Brand Believers—were responsible for 55 percent of the airline’s revenue.

What do you think would happen if the airlines took some of the resources they were willing to allocate to pleasing their Brand Lovers and devoted them instead to strengthening the relationship they had with Brand Believers? Enhancing an existing relationship requires developing an understanding of this customer groups’ wants and needs. It’s important to identify and articulate how they are both similar to and different from your existing Brand Lovers. This understanding will allow you to identify the messaging and operational tweaks that can bring your Brand Believers over the Brand Lover group.

What would happen to your bottom line if your “Sometimes” customer became an “Always” customer? It can happen, if you’re willing to put your customers first.

Be A Better Brand Manager: The Essentials

  • Rewarding your Brand Lovers is a smart strategy, but it can’t be your only strategy. Balancing Brand Lover Retention with Brand Lover Creation is essential.
  • Customer loyalty exists along a continuum. You need a layered understanding of your customers’ feelings about your brand.
  • Be willing to go against industry norms. Every airline rewards the top 2%. What will happen to the airline that’s brave enough to reward the top 10%?
August 13, 2013 by

Be A Better Brand Manager: Know The Emotional Landscape

target-logoIn early May, Target announced a limited roll-out of a new service offering. Shoppers in the Los Angeles and Orange County area will now be able to consult with a brand-agnostic beauty concierge who’s there to offer advice and insights about the cosmetics and personal care products available at Target.

At a time when retailers are scrutinizing every expense in order to cut costs, and pundits are predicting the end of full-time retail employment, Target’s actually adding an entire new category of employee — a group that by definition will need to have greater product knowledge and customer service skills than the typical front-line worker, which may make them more expensive to recruit and retain. What’s up with that?

Know The Emotional Landscape

Target has defined its role in the marketplace as the store where guests always find more than they expect. As a brand manager, that’s a tricky concept: what does it mean to know your customer’s expectations and surpass them? An intense amount of customer knowledge is required. You need to know more than who your customers are: you need a concrete understanding of who your customers aspire to be.

If the world was perfect for your customer, what types of experiences would they have? How would they be treated by other people? What types of merchandise would they be able to buy? What types of services would they take for granted? What types of emotions would customers be feeling, on a day when everything was going right?

We’ve already seen Target addressing these questions in terms of access to merchandise. Giving guests more than they expect translates into high-end merchandise at attainable prices. Beginning in 1999, Target began offering designer clothing, including collections from Michael Graves and Issac Mizrahi. The Go International Line, which launched in 2005, features collections from world-renowned high-end designers for a period of 90 days. In many cases, Target provided the only way for their best customer —typically female, college-aged, and in her mid-forties —to access the fashions they wanted and felt they deserved.

This has been a powerful and effective strategy. Target is the second-largest discount retailer in the United States, trailing only Walmart. The move to introduce beauty concierges to their offerings extends the paradigm into the world of services. The high-touch, personalized service a concierge offers is not a typical feature of the discount shopping experience, yet it would be something that Target shoppers would be able to take for granted in an ideal world. It’s a smart move that will strengthen the bond Target has with their best customers, also known as their Brand Lovers.

Be A Better Brand Manager: The Essentials

Spend time with your customers. Talk to them and listen to them, so you can learn who they are and who they want to be.

Consider every dimension of the retail experience through your customer’s eyes. Everything has an emotional impact: merchandise, services, environment, and engagement.

Look for ways to give your customers what they never thought they could have. Create an emotional landscape they never want to leave!

August 5, 2013 by

Be A Better Brand Manager: Measure Everything

It’s pop quiz time! Where do baby Geckos come from?

If your answer begins “When a Mommy Gecko and a Daddy Gecko love each other very much…” stop now. And this isn’t really part of the ever-popular live birth vs. eggs debate either. Geckos, or at least the Geico Gecko, which is the one we’re particularly interested in, owes its ongoing existence to a very proud set of data.

In an interview with AdAge, Ted Ward, Geico’s CMO, said, “The green scaly spokes-character you reference was actually born in a petri dish of data. The Gecko was ‘hatched’ with absolutely no research or even the intention of producing a long-running, iconic campaign. The fact is we analyzed results from running the first set of Gecko TV spots and liked the bump in business volume. We were able to attribute the increased business to the campaign and decided to move forward with additional Gecko executions. From that point on we have incorporated more traditional market research to track and monitor consumer sentiment related to the little green guy.”

Cult Brands Measure Everything

The measurement-centric approach definitely appears to be working. Geico appears to be on the verge of moving past Allstate to capture the #2 spot in the highly competitive auto insurance industry. Many pundits have attributed Geico’s success to their huge advertising budget, but as we all know, there are plenty of brands out there that do a ton of advertising without achieving a dominant position in their industry.

What makes the Geico story important for brand managers is the explicit relationship between marketing campaigns and the measurement thereof. When Geico knew, with a high degree of certainty, what types of messaging were most effective at capturing both customer interest and business, they were able to replicate the essential elements of that campaign in other campaigns.  Geico’s Cavemen and Maxwell the Pig campaigns were both powerful tools for the brand, but who knows if they ever would have seen the light of day if there’d been no data to support the fact that quirky humor helped sell car insurance?

Being unique in the marketplace is not easy. Creativity requires courage. That creative courage is sometimes at odds with institutional decision makers who prefer a more conservative approach. Measuring everything and making smart use of the data makes it easier to get the creative freedom you need to be an effective brand manager because you can say, with a high degree of certainty, that your campaigns will be successful before you launch them.

Be a Better Brand Manager: The Essentials

Data is your friend. The more you know about your customers, including how they find you, their path to purchasing, and how they talk about you online, the better you’ll be able to serve them.

Data needs interpretation to be a meaningful asset. Ideally, you’re looking for identifiable patterns of behavior held in common by significant numbers of your customers. This will allow you to figure out how well your campaigns are working.

Be willing to accept that data doesn’t always dance the way you want it to. The results of inquiry will not always yield up  the answers you’re hoping to hear. Great brand managers listen to what their customers are telling them.

July 30, 2013 by

Be A Better Brand Manager: Understand What Doing Business With You Gives The Customer

Do you recognize that image in the corner? It’s a shot from NBC’s Today show, covering the Cronut phenomenon. Cronuts, in case you haven’t heard, are the legendarily delicious pastry creation of the Dominique Ansel Bakery in New York City.  Only 200-250 are produced each day, and you can only buy 2 at a time.  People are willing to stand in line for hours to get a Cronut, and if you don’t have the time to invest, don’t despair. An underground Cronut economy has sprung up, with scalpers more than happy to sell you the $5 treat for a cool $30.

The media has been going nuts trying to figure out what’s going on here. Reporter after reporter has gotten testimony that the Cronut is, indeed, delicious. But there are over 4,000 bakeries in New York City — and that’s not even counting the street vendors and food trucks that have more than a few scrumptious baked goods for sale.

To understand the Cronut phenomenon, you need to know one thing. The Cronut may be very good. But it is the experience of getting the Cronut that is even better.

Cult Brands Deliver Memorable Experiences

Buying a Cronut is not a simple endeavor. The high demand and low supply requires New Yorkers to do something antithetical to their kind: stand patiently in line and accept the fact that they may, in fact, be disappointed. It’s a low-cost version of the heroes quest. Demands are put upon one, albeit only for patience and civility, and at the end, there’s the uncertain promise of a reward. You may get your Cronut, you may not.

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter whether or not you’ve gotten the Cronut. What matters to the people lining up is that they’ve been part of the Cronut experience. They have a unique story to tell, their own personal angle of the story of the moment. Even those folks who pay scalpers for Cronuts are participating in the larger narrative: for the price of a few dollars more, they can position themselves as the possessor of the smartest sweet tooth.

The stories we tell about the experiences we actually have are most valuable form of social currency we have. Cult brands know this, and go out of their way to provide experiences that are worth talking about. Every time a customer lines up at the Dominique Ansel Bakery, they may or may not come away with a Cronut. But they definitely will have a story that they can tell to their family and friends for years to come.

Be a Better Brand Manager: The Essentials

Having great products and services is only the starting point. To create a Cult Brand, you need to identify and deliver an experience your customers will want to share with all of their family and friends.

The stories we tell about our own direct experiences are the most valuable form of social currency. Customers value these stories more highly than stories they can tell about things that happened to someone they knew or heard about.

Scarcity has its role in the marketing mix. Combining limited supply with a positive experience is an irresistible combination.

July 24, 2013 by

Be A Better Brand Manager: Know The Narrative and When to Disrupt It

As a brand manager, you’re well aware of how difficult it is to capture your customer’s attention in the current super-saturated messaging environment.  The ubiquity of smartphones and tablet computers means our buyers are always ‘plugged in’, consuming the content they’ve chosen for themselves; CNN reports that adult Americans are spending at least 8 hours of every day staring at a screen.

What can you do to stand out in that environment?

We think that the folks at the Discovery Channel might have a clue. Check out this commercial:

Know The Narrative and When to Disrupt It

In two days, the official Discovery Channel Youtube video has been viewed more than 30,000 times. What is it about this particular commercial that has captured the public’s imagination?

The spot is a variation on a classic story telling device, the Bait-and-Switch. The Bait-and-Switch is a narrative device where viewers are led to believe they should expect one thing, only to experience something completely different.

Traditionally, a Bait-and-Switch leads the viewer in with content they believe to be of high value, only to deliver content of lower value. But in this case, Discovery Channel, demonstrating a superior understanding of what their customers truly enjoy, lead the viewer to expect a heartwarming tale of a rehabilitated seal and delivered a massive shark having a snack.

High value content was followed by higher value content. A story that the viewer felt they ‘should’ care about, in order to be viewed as a good person under prevailing cultural norms, was replaced with a ‘guilty pleasure’ story that they truly enjoyed.

The experience of this unusual Bait-and-Switch is novel enough to make the viewer actually pay attention to what they’re watching. The commercial shocked the viewer to another level of awareness, forcing them to examine their perceptions from a new perspective.

If you’d like to use the same technique to connect with your customers, there are two things you need to know: what narratives your customer expects to encounter in the course of their day, and what narratives your customer would like to encounter during the course of the day. This requires significant psychological insight. A nuanced understanding of your customer’s life experiences and the factors that influence their worldview is essential. You need to know what they truly enjoy, and what they feel socially or morally obligated to enjoy. The juxtaposition of the two is a powerful attention getter.

Be A Better Brand Manager: The Essentials

  • Familiarize yourself with universal narratives, and the stories that are most relevant to your best customers.
  • Maintain an awareness of the media your customers are consuming, and what tales they’re being told. You can’t provide something outside of the norm if you don’t know what the norm is.
  • Understanding the social and cultural pressures that dictate how your customers feel they should behave makes it easier to craft messaging that will attract their attention.
July 12, 2013 by

Be A Better Brand Manager: Attend the Cult Branding Symposium

Here’s your chance to learn how you can put the secrets of Cult Branding to work for your company. Join BJ Bueno for a focused, growth-oriented session on the forces that influence customer loyalty. The Cult Branding Symposium is your opportunity to tap into the insights, strategies, and unique humanistic approach top brands like Wal-Mart, Coca-Cola, Target, Kohl’s and Scheels used to achieve their dominant place in the market today.

When you attend the Cult Branding Symposium, you’ll learn:

– The Seven Steps to Cultivating Customer Loyalty
– Decoding Brand Communities

With this knowledge, you’ll be able to attract more business and build long-lasting, profitable relationships with your customers. The symposium has been designed to facilitate real learning, with specialized support materials to enhance and augment the educational experience. Symposium participants will receive:

– Hardcover copy of Customers First: Dominate Your Market By Winning Them Over Where They Count The Most (McGraw-Hill 2012)
– Digital copies of the decks presented at the symposium so you can share them with your marketing team (in PowerPoint format)
– Whitepaper, “Why Customers Join Brand Communities” (PDF)

Have You Been Struggling to Bring Your Company to the Next Level?

Building a strong, sustainable business isn’t an easy process. There are times when even the best companies get stuck on the journey from good to great. Consistently, it’s the companies that have the best understanding of who their customers are and the unconscious forces that drive their purchasing decisions that get ‘unstuck’ and go on to become powerhouse profitable Cult Brands.

You don’t have to stay stuck. Space for this special session is limited, and you don’t want to miss out on this unique educational opportunity. Register for the Cult Branding Symposium today!

June 27, 2013 by

Be A Better Brand Manager: Know What Time It Is

imagesThe Gilt Groupe is a flash sale company. On their website, they host extremely short-term sales events (most last less than two hours!) featuring limited quantities of merchandise from top brands. The combination of short duration and limited quantities makes an appealing mix for competitive shoppers, who are legion. In six years, the brand has accumulated 7 million customers.

Why, then, did the Gilt Group recently take a 90-day break from sourcing new merchandise, adding any new services, or even trying to attract new business?

Know What Time It Is

According to the story Alexis Maybanks, Gilt Groupe’s co-founder, shared at the Women Entrepreneurs Rock the World Conference, the company was experiencing tremendous growth, and with that growth came some growing pains. The sales volume was overwhelming; the customer service department was swamped.

The Gilt Groupe leadership team faced a choice: continue pursuing growth at any cost, or put the brakes on long enough to focus the organization’s energy and resources on better serving the existing customer base?

This is not a unique challenge in the retail world. Every brand wants to grow; many brand managers have been duped into thinking that growth generation is the raison d’etre for their profession. And they’re not completely wrong: a brand that is not growing is a brand that is dying.

The Gilt Groupe demonstrated an understanding that not all growth is equally desirable. There’s a difference between sustainable growth (an increase in market share that allows a company to both attract and please new customers) and problematic growth, where the sheer volume of customer traffic rapidly outpaces the brand’s ability to provide an emotionally satisfying experience on an individual basis.

Problematic growth is the retail equivalent of a Bangladeshi garment factory: the building gets taller and taller, with more and more people inside of it, working harder and harder — all until the critical moment where the building’s infrastructure fails and everything comes down in a horrible crash.

A Time To Build, A Time To Grow

As a Brand Manager, you don’t want to build the Bangladeshi garment factory. You want to build a strong company with a robust retail infrastructure to support brand growth. That means you have to know what time it is. Consider your brand’s current circumstances, and examine how well you’re pleasing your customers. Be objective and analytical. Ask lots of questions, including:

  • How long does it take your customers to place an order or make a purchase?
  • Is it easy to reach your customer service department?
  • How long does it take for the typical complaint to be resolved?
  • How many complaints do you have, and what are those complaints about? (Be aware that customers can leave without ever once voicing their displeasure with how you’re doing things.)
  • What percentage of your business comes from repeat customers?
  • How much of your new business converts into an ongoing relationship?

It’s only after you have the answers to these questions, and you can compare the actual results to the benchmarks of performance that you’d like to see, that you can determine what time it is. Is it time to concentrate on building your company by improving and enhancing the customer experience, or do you have the justifiable confidence to focus your efforts on growth?

Sustainable growth is a balancing act, predicated on the understanding that it is always ultimately better for brand longevity to build a good company than a bad one. Customers are drawn in when they know they’ll be treated well; they’ll stay when you prove it to them.

The effort and energy Gilt Groupe put into building up their website and customer service capabilities is time well spent. So much of the brand’s appeal is dependent on a specific emotional experience: the thrill of competitive shopping, coupled with the triumph of getting in on the deal. Ensuring that there are no technical difficulties or overwhelmed staffers to short-circuit that emotional experience will result in brand growth.

Be A Better Brand Manager: The Essentials

Know what time it is. Assess your company’s performance regularly and objectively.

Improving the customer experience always pays off.

Don’t be afraid to put on the brakes. Going full speed is no good if it takes your company right into the wall of disappointing your customers.

May 28, 2013 by

When Should A Brand Manager Say “We Don’t Want You In Our Stores?”

Abercrombie_and_Fitch-logo-2A582EB94D-seeklogo.comBeing a great brand manager isn’t about understanding what will make everyone love your store. Being a great brand manager is about understanding what will make your best customers love your store.

These two things are very different, and we’re seeing this illustrated by the recent flurry of headlines surrounding Abercrombie CEO Mike Jeffries’ 2006 comments about why the apparel chain doesn’t carry women’s apparel in large and extra-large sizes.

Here’s what Jeffries said, “In every school there are the cool and popular kids, and then there are the not-so-cool kids. Candidly, we go after the cool kids. We go after the attractive all-American kid with a great attitude and a lot of friends. A lot of people don’t belong [in our clothes], and they can’t belong. Are we exclusionary? Absolutely. Those companies that are in trouble are trying to target everybody: young, old, fat, skinny.”

It’s not a warm and fuzzy sentiment, particularly in an environment where nearly 7 out of every 10 shoppers are plus-sized. But is it bad brand management? That’s a conversation we should be having.

Be Your Customers’ Advocate

Abercrombie & Fitch’s critics have been quick to point out what the retail chain doesn’t sell, and the impact those omissions have made on the brand’s overall profitability. But let’s take a step back, and look at what the brand does sell, and how those choices have served Abercrombie & Fitch over the course of time.

The larger sizes Abercrombie & Fitch doesn’t carry are readily available in other stores. But try finding the extremely petite sizes—0 or 00—that Abercrombie & Fitch’s loyal customers snatch up by the armful. You’re going to have a really tough time. The Ambercrombie & Fitch team has a clear vision of who their customer is. This vision has helped them understand what those customers need.

Customer needs are complex and multi-dimensional, but let’s stick to one simple need—specifically, clothes that actually fit. Abercrombie & Fitch provides clothing in sizes that their customers can’t easily get elsewhere. Customer advocacy, in terms of identifying this need, aggressively searching out solutions to the need, and making those solutions central to the brand identity, are all traits we see embodied by people universally considered to be exceptional brand managers.

The fact that Abercrombie & Fitch’s customers are members of a thin minority rather than a plus-sized majority doesn’t mean they don’t still have their own unique set of needs and psychological motivations. By recognizing this, Abercrombie & Fitch has carved out a sustainably profitable niche in the crowded retail apparel marketplace.

Jeffries’ business choices are being scrutinized now, as Abercrombie & Fitch is shuffling through a slow period, but if we take a longer perspective, looking at the chain’s performance over the course of a decade or more, Jeffries’ approach does seem to work. If anything, the chain seems to be positioning itself to be even more exclusive: stores in less-afluent demographics are being closed as part of a consolidation process.

It may seem counter-intuitive as a brand manager to consider what customers you don’t want in your store. But it is a valuable exercise. Knowing who your customers aren’t can help you refine your definition of who your customers are.

May 23, 2013 by