mitgrant

[mitgrant]

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Luxury

Whether one can afford absolute luxury or simply accessible luxury, it is clear that luxury is more than just the exquisite, discernable, or even dubious value of the product. It is the story of timelessness, heritage, and rarity that are the value-add.

For our lab project, we are working on refining the brand image of a blog that tackles two topics in humorous and approachable ways. One, to break the taboo that career-related matters always have to be approached in a rigid way and two, to help professionals decide whether to (re)enter the job market or to develop themselves in a simpler and more enjoyable way.

For us, many of the blog readers are at the crossroads in their careers. They may either continue a lifestyle pursuing luxury (conscious or unconscious) or close the book and drop out of the rat race to focus more on living life.

Ultimately, readers will choose a direction. For the ones who will choose to pursue luxury, we must tell the story of the luxurious lifestyle to appeal to them. To re-engage their imagination and dreams as they charge forward. Let the humor be that of a renaissance man when discussing the pros of doubling down on the career: eclectic, sophisticated, and exclusive. to those who are not attracted to this, it will also reassure them that it is not what they want. If the reverse is true as well, the blog may capture the imaginations of both groups of readers without alienating them from the blog, just the alternate lifestyle.

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[mitgrant]

Is taste in the wine or the mind of the beholder?

Have you seen the videos of people trying to get supposed wine connoisseurs into rating different wines? Or have you tried tasting several wines with your friends? Invariably, someone makes two of the wines the same or substitutes one of them with a really cheap wine in an attempt to show how biased our palates are by the label on the bottle. While not rigorously scientific, this undeniably shows how influenced we are by the price and label on the bottle, yet still is based on the fact that some wines are distinctly better than others.

For Concha Y Torro, the label that says “Product of Chile” inhibited them for years from being able to command the respect and enjoy the price premium deserving of their product. Unlike France or Italy, which had incredibly historic and prominent images in our minds, Chile did not. Thus, the associations might have been cheap, rural, South America and not conducive to a premium wine brand.

The major turning point is when the French wine snobs were ‘tricked’ into selecting 3 Chilean wines in the top 5, very similar to what Napa did in the Judgement of Paris. Thus, the better taste was in the wine, not the beholder here. Perhaps for this judgement, when we think of Chilean wines today, we associate it with a beautiful countryside stretching from near the equator to near the Antarctic, quality wines at fair prices, and perhaps a more provincial atmosphere, conducive to the imagery of stunning vineyards at the feet of the Andes.

Beyond the wine industry, the legacy of countries or even cities is used to brand many other products: German automobiles, Swiss watches, Japanese knives, and American made. Cultivating particular associations is undoubtably a powerful tool in influencing the taste in the mind of the beholder, as they probably were earned at some point because of superior product.

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[mitgrant]

Customer Journey Mapping - Sonos

The benefits of proper customer journey mapping are clear. If a company can anticipate one’s activities, motivations, questions, and barriers, they can preempt those to accelerate a customer’s journey through the funnel.

I see two major challenges that firms face when trying to build customer journey maps. First, employees and insiders suffer from the curse of knowledge, and may think they can create a customer journey map themselves without performing the research, which might not target actual concerns. Or, even as they do listen and build a map from the potential customers, the solutions devised might still be biased to someone from a position of knowledge. There is no substitute for sourcing these maps directly from customers and testing possible solutions to people who are new to the product.

This brings us to the second point. Building a good customer journey map is expensive. There are no two ways about it, paying for customer interviews, collecting data, ideating, creating, testing all takes time and money. To cash strapped startups, this may not seem palatable, but is arguably one of the most important tools to bring in actual sales, build loyal customers, and get referrals.

One product that I really loved unboxing, setting up, and using was the Sonos sound system. While something like this could have been challenging as the article described, the instructions were clear, the app guided me through the process, the sound quality was great, and I now have seamless audio throughout my apartment. They anticipated and preempted many challenges that I might have had, and the result is that I love the product and convinced a friend to go with them over competitors because of the experience.

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