Whole Foods, a darling among brand enthusiasts for re-inventing the grocery experience, has long been praised for the ability to appeal to an upscale, young and mobile audience in trendy neighborhoods.
So when the opening of their store in Chicago’s Englewood district was reported last week, many experts raised the question of how can they expect to succeed in a low-income, crime-ridden market.
Brands do indeed have boundaries and building a brand requires the constant choice of not being all things to all people. Every legitimate brand expert knows this.
But boundaries for brands rarely exist along geographic lines, age ranges or income brackets. Whole Foods new expansion plan demonstrates what does define these boundaries.
We have helped brands launch new offerings and enter new markets in literally dozens of categories. In every single case we have found that the brand choices that people make reflect their overall attitudes.
For instance, are you financially conservative or progressive? Do you seek out new things or comfortable with what you know? Do you leverage technology more for entertainment or productivity? These variables are consistently the strongest predictors of brand choice, as illustrated in the chart below.
Whole Foods, in this light, appears poised for success by providing an offering to a market more about an inclusive point of view rather then one reserved for a certain socio-economic status.
This is the invaluable view of today’s enlightened marketer and provides the perspective for making the difficult brand choices of who to appeal to, what sets their experience expectations, who your real competitors are and which are the best potential partners.
Brands do indeed have boundaries; they just may not be what we’ve been taught all these years.
