All Super-Rich women are not the same.
Defining segments within a consumer universe which is barely a million.
Consumer and Brand Understanding across the precious jewellery spectrum:
There is gold and then there is diamond jewellery. There are super-rich, well-travelled shoppers and then there are the large festive buys from the traditional families. While they all involve high levels of spending, I re-learned the lesson of segmentation even within premium buyers. And the challenge of persuading those scattered across pockets of India, who are not easily “visible” to marketers.
My exciting introduction to it happened at mConsult when we first dived into consumer understanding of the luxury buyer back in around 2006. De Beers was preparing to promote Forevermark in India. These were times when brands were still wondering if there were enough luxury consumers in India to warrant marketing efforts (Atmosphere, the brand of fine silk furnishings, also asked the same question of Quadra Advisory when we did the market entry strategy for them in India). The answer was yes, of course. We did need to answer the question about what was this super-premium consumer’s purchase journey was. What were the relevant touchpoints, and what factors drove brand choice? At the time, the media challenge was that their habits were very similar to those of mass consumers. Today, the challenge is that there is a lot of diversity and it is a challenge to find these consumers in a place where you can deliver impact.
The work on Zoya, the premium diamond jewellery brand came over 10 years later. The consumer outlook was very different, but the challenges of accessing this segment remained. The task was to interrogate and define how Zoya was going to be different from Tanishq. With Arif Padiath, the business head of Zoya, we dived into understanding consumers who were not merely rich, but super-rich. The 75 in-depth consumer interviews of super-rich women in Mumbai and Delhi that I did myself were exhausting and exhilarating. We discovered that there are several types of rich women! It was very interesting to discover which demographics and psychographics truly differentiated between brand choices.
Given the nature of the TG, we couldn’t do any quantitative segmentation so we had to visualise.
The Zoya brand team and I segmented and chose the target consumer, articulated the brand positioning and defined the roster of marketing initiatives. I came to appreciate the huge difference in the cost per sq. ft., as well as the service SOPs in a luxury store versus the merely premium. As I love to do, I stayed involved in the execution of brand and store initiatives until they shored up the internal marketing team. The “Craftsman” TVC that was created truly captured the essence of the brand.
From two stores then, to a dozen today is quite a number for such a premium offering. I feel great pride in seeing the strategic pillars that the brand continues to use even today.