Marketing CSI. It's not what you think. [MUSIC] Welcome to the segment "Marketing CSI". And my very poor Horatio Caine impression not withstanding, CSI stands for, not what you think, but instead, Consumer Science Investigation. Let me thank Eric Lee for the help on the vocals on the opening. This will be the agenda. I'll set up what B2C and B2B marketing means, and we'll talk about B2B in a different module. But I will explain how they differ, and we'll focus on what CSI means. And it really means profiling. And so we will get to learn what profiling means but also actually do it to a very important customer type. The Gold Misses. So let's get started, okay, so we hear often of these words B2C and B2B and they referred to these two broad domains within marketing. One which is marketing to consumers and hence, Business to Consumer, the business meaning us, and also B2B, meaning Business to Business. But let me emphasize that in the way, when we think about the value chain in marketing, all marketing ends with the consumer. And therefore, I think it's much more appropriate to call it B2B2C, even though we're targeting maybe different direct users at the first time. Okay, so what does CSI mean? Again, it means Consumer Science Investigation. And understanding consumers, it's precisely that. Even though there is a lot of art and intuition involved, ultimately, it's about you gathering data and putting all the pieces together to profile your consumer. So in a way, it's a very micro Emica type of approach. We talked about Emica marketing in the context of culture. But in a way, consumers too have to be understood, not only at the superficial level, but also at sort of the deep down hidden levels as well. And it's almost like you acting as an FBI profiler. And I watch, you will have guessed by now, a lot of movies and a lot of television shows. And the FBI profilers that we see in movies like Silence of the Lamb, they try to get inside the minds of criminals in their case. But, for you, as a profiler, you need to get inside the minds of consumers. To really understand their Noon Nopi, wherever that level may be. Through the gathering of different kinds of data, we try to triangulate a consistent picture of that consumer. And this is where I think my new endeavor, my vocation as a film maker, I think helps me. Because in film making, we talk about Mise en scène, which is a french word for framing. And how you frame a scene is really very, very important. So my first film was called I Profess. And it talks about this professor who has to lecture for the very first time. So it's about a stage fright. And so even though I'm showing you just one scene from that movie, each scene is like a movie in terms of the framing. In terms of the kind of Noon Nopi, that you want to convey to the viewer. So everything matters, whether it's the camera angle. Whether it's the lighting, whether it's the props in terms of what he wears and how he holds the chalk. And if he were to sip water, that would all combine to convey how nervous he is. So in a way, consumer science is like that too. Because you're collecting evidence about, for this portrait, or profile of your consumer. If we were to see the whole movie, of course, then it would be very easy. But even when just seeing a scene, we still have to infer what the motivation of, not only that scene, but the whole narrative the movie is like as well. So you too, collecting evidence of a consumer, have to retrace what the consumer is thinking. Okay, so let's do that in the case of the gold misses. And I have a case which I co-wrote with Kevin Sperole at Singapore Management University, where we try to profile this very important consumer here in Asia. And we'll get to also talk about them with Helen Lee from Swarovski, when I interview her. So, while the pieces of the puzzles, so to speak, are easy to identify, such as, of course, whether they're married or not, and they're not. That's why they're called Gold Misses and they're called gold because they make a lot of money. They're in these very prominent high flyer occupations. So the incomes levels we can measure. Not only for Korea but for other countries like Japan and increasingly, China, and also in India. We can also, I think, identify where she lives and because of her income she tends to live in rather nice neighborhoods and she lives, often alone. But in some cases with her parents, which creates some angst in terms of them wanting her to get married. We can also, with data, analyze the kind of car she drives, or the kind of brand that she prefers. And for the most part, there are products or brand that bespeak her of rather high status. So, all of these, her profiling I think for the most part is easy to Identify. But again, maybe this is all at the surface. What makes her really tick? What motivates her to continue, after sort of aspiration to break down these glass ceilings, in their respective countries. That's a much harder question to answer. So that is why we have to profile them. And there is this great article by Han, Nunes and Dreze which came out in the Journal of Marketing. And this is just one of the interesting bits of Insights offered by the article. And so we see here, through a combination of demographics and motivations, we begin to classify different types of consumers, different types of luxury consumers. And we see here that it's not just a matter of money. That some types such as the patricians and the poseurs. For them, it's independent of the kind of money that they have or don't have. So, for the poseurs, it's the aspiration that they want to be, sort of respect it. They want to belong and that's where, maybe, even though they can't buy these luxury products, they can still afford monogram products and maybe can also infer that they might even buy our counterfits. Because, again, they want to belong. In the case of the Patricians, even though they have the money, they don't need to show it. So their sort of status manifestation is much more discreet. Which makes it harder if you are targeting them as marketers, because they try to be much more individualistic in terms of what they buy. And even though the study wasn't just sort of focused on Asia, I think this might be a very useful concept in which we can compare the evolution of countries herein Asia. Where maybe countries, on an average sort of basis, start out being maybe much more of a Poseur kind of consumer, or country. Gradually, with hiring comes, they evolve to a above and new kind of class. Where they want to show that they've made it. And so, up and coming countries and consumers here in Asia maybe are like that. But as their incomes grow, we clearly see that they want to sort of manifest individual taste. And even though collectivism is still high in Asia, some segments, most noticeably goldness like consumers. They want their brands and products at a much more discreet and much more quiet in terms of the kind of signalling that they want to make, to others and to the market. So, in some, we see how profiling helps us In terms of understanding a consumer and also in terms of guidingmarketing strategy and action.
