Brand and the crisis

Résumé du document

The crisis has modified the habits of consumption of everyday life. However, for three years, people in France were talking about problems with their purchase power. They saw that prices were growing faster than their incomes. The crisis has just sped up in this phenomenon. This feeling of loosing purchase power is not exclusively perceived by people which represent the poorest states of the society but by almost everybody. And 83% think prices have risen more. And amazingly there are three main responsible for that according to the customers. The government is just occupying the third position with 75% of votes. The two responsible almost ex-aequo are the mass-market (92%) retailing and the brands (91%). The brands seem to be a good designed target. The mass-market retailing is the first in the consumers' mind but they have no other choice than carry on going there for shopping. Brands saw their sales decreasing in the last three or four years and more, since the beginning of the crisis. We can raise some questions. How do brands react to that? How to change a consumer's mind? Is there some brand which plays the game well?

Extraits

[...] Maif “Assureur militant”, also plays with the proximity. Maif is aware of the daily problems and they insure all what people need for their everyday life or their projects. The word ‘militant' is strong and means that the Maif take commitments, it's deliberately strong to make people change their minds about insurances. To notice: There is also another sector more unexpected: the beauty and luxury goods. Pantène, Maybelline, but also Nivea with Draftfcb. By specifying in their communication their number one rank on some segments, they managed to prove their solidity and reliability. [...]

[...] There always been this type of adverts but with the crisis it had become more systematic. Traditionally, some brands do it like cars manufacturers but other brands follow it which are more unusual like Air France. Before, Air France was selling trip, holidays or even more dream, they were selling imaginary. Now they are selling plane tickets which cost a certain price, it's totally concrete and it's a new strategy to attract customers clearly influenced by the economical context. Price is the main actor of this type of advert. [...]

[...] One of the first to did it was Volkswagen. They made a campaign composed of three movies which stage depressed traders in group therapy. We see the traders making a detoxification of ‘dangerous investments'. There is a clothes brand which was completely created during the crisis and was named “fuck la crise”. It's obviously an opportunist way to promote the brand without investing in communication, using the context. They build the brand awareness only with word-of-mouth and press articles thanks to the name deliberately a little shocking and of current events. [...]

[...] The Price Effectively, the most evident is to play with prices because it became the first criteria of buying for consumers. People want to buy at the lowest price possible, and brands had understand that. That's how a lot of new advertisings come. There are two manners to play with prices, one subjective as we will see with priceminister, using words which are link with prices but without giving any amount; and the other is simply to show the price. [...]

[...] Stingy is not pejorative anymore, it's become a need in this period. Even the advertising reflects the slogan, there is no picture, few colors and it's really simple. It's look like it was made with few money and very rapidly. The message implies that people spend too much money by buying product too expensive and by buying on priceminister they will make the good deal. This campaign is accompanying with a lot of hoarse prices on the website of priceminister, written in big and flashy characters to attract the eye and push the ‘surfers' to make impulse buying. [...]