The OS for Brunello Cucinelli Customers
This is a book installment, a case study from the upcoming book Valuegraphics: The OS for Your Target Audience.
Case Study for Brunello Cucinelli Customers
Writing a book is a lot of hard work, so it’s perfectly acceptable to indulge myself just a little from time to time, don’t you think? And if that authorial self-indulgence results in an excellent story to add to the book, then so much the better, am I right? I sure hope you agree because this case study is very personal to me: it’s about one of my favorite brands in the world, Brunello Cucinelli. If you are reading this Mr. Cucinelli, what follows is a tip of my hat to you.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with the outrageously beautiful and well-made clothing and accessories that Brunello Cucinelli is known for, I’m not sure what else to say except they are outrageously beautiful and well-made. And yes, reassuringly expensive. But there’s a reason why. You are not just buying clothes; you are buying into an experiment in brand-building based on values.
Mr. Cucinelli has been slowly reinvigorating small-town life in northern Italy, places with a history of making beautiful clothes. The old factory looms and mills are running again, the Nonnas are bringing lunch to the workers, the churches and schools are full once more, and the kids are learning the trades perilously close to being lost. In short, the brand is based on pursuing a set of values. If I were to guess, I’d say the values central to the Cucinelli strategy include Community, Harmony, Respect, Tradition, Patience, and most definitely Service to Others. While there are probably faster ways to scale and smarter ways to grow than by rebuilding the past, giving people pride, and creating a future for their families, this example of doing well by doing good seems to be working out just fine.
So I thought it would be interesting to profile Cucinelli customers to see how their values stack up and if the Cucinelli brand is on-point. We surveyed a statistically representative sample of those who consider themselves regular purchasers, as well as those we will call prospects. Prospects are well-aware of the brand, find it desirable, and have just not yet committed to buying their first piece. Between those two samples, we now have the OS for both the current Cucinelli customer and the prospective customers who can be easily convinced to join the clan.
And since this custom Valuegraphics profile was at least partly for my own pleasure, I thought it would be interesting to do the same thing in another part of the world. So, in addition to the USA, we also surveyed customers and prospects in China.
So now we can have all sorts of fun looking at what customers and prospects care about in two different parts of the world. How similar are they? How different? What values do they share in common? All this and more, coming right up! Let the games begin!
I could fill a few pages with demographics and psychographics specific to each country and the audience segments we discovered. But unless you are the director of marketing for the Cucinelli brand, these details will not be all that exciting. So let’s stick to the most fun bits, starting with these three general observations that I found quite intriguing:
The Chinese are more likely to feel that wearing Cucinelli will benefit their family. They see it as a means to an end. If you look successful, their thinking goes, it will help you be successful, and ultimately your family will benefit.
On the other hand, the USA buyer looks at Cucinelli (and other luxury purchases) as an end goal, not as a tool to accomplish something else. Curiously, we saw this same distinction between the Chinese and USA target audiences for another luxury clothing brand we have profiled. And while we only have these two instances, it makes me wonder if the same thing is true across the entire high-end clothing category: in China, what you wear is a tool to help you get where you want to be, while in the USA this type of clothing is enjoyed for its own sake.
The emphasis Cucinelli places on positioning the brand around a set of core values shows up in survey responses, but for very different reasons. People in the USA frame their attraction to Cucinelli brand values in terms of respect. In other words, “I respect what they stand for.” In China, people emulate the brand, as in: “I want to be like that too.”
Cucinelli Customers in the USA vs. China
Different things drive Cucinelli customers in the USA and China, so brand messages will be more potent if they are tweaked slightly to reflect what people care about in each part of the world.
It’s not that entirely different positioning is required, just that there’s an opportunity to leverage different values and be even more precisely appealing in each market.
It’s like two groups of ice-cream fanatics: one group loves chocolate, and the other prefers butter pecan. Both groups love love love ice-cream and would consume any flavor. But if you know the exact flavor they crave, why not make both groups swoon? In other words, don’t use an identical campaign in both regions and expect optimum results.
Of course, you might find a way to blend both Valuegraphic profiles without diminishing the appeal in either market, just as you might build an ice-cream sundae with scoops of both chocolate and butter pecan. But there’s a risk. If you don’t get the flavor proportions just right, you’ll end up with a confusing sticky mess that doesn’t appeal to anyone.
Cucinelli Customers vs. Prospects
There is a big difference between customers and prospects in China, while there are more minor differences in the USA. Even a quick glance shows how the comparative data lines up in more of a tidy straight line on the USA chart than on the chart for China.
Consequently, in China, the challenge is to embrace a wider variety of people with marketing strategies to reflect more disparate values.
Here’s an example: customers in China are influenced far more by Health & Well-Being than prospects are. Prospects, however, are huge on Experiences.
To illustrate how values can drive solutions, let’s pretend the assignment is to plan an event. The objective of this event is to reward your best customers and jump-start sales for a new season. While we’re at it, let’s see if we can also convert some prospects into customers. And since we’re pretending, I’ve decided to pretend the budget for this event is limitless.
What if you staged an elaborate outdoor dinner in an extraordinary location that triggers the enormous importance Cucinelli customers place on the value of Health & Well-Being. Guests are seated at a long linen-draped table, center-field in a football stadium which you’ve rented for the occasion. Transportation to and from the dinner is part of the show, of course. Cucinelli-clad models with luscious Italian accents who are also magically fluent in Chinese will chauffeur guests to the dinner in elegant town cars.
You invite your very best customers of course. But interspersed around the table, you place prospects that are likely candidates for conversion to loyal customers because, after all, the importance they place on Experiences will leave them feeling like they have scored a sartorial goal by being part of this special event.
And since this pretending game is so much fun, let’s go crazy. There’s a fashion show during the cocktail hour with famous football players sporting the latest collection. Look! Here comes David Beckham wearing the new indigo-dyed cashmere dinner jacket! And of course, we will send everyone home with a gift: a butter-soft limited edition leather soccer ball created by Cucinelli artisans just for this night, autographed by the football star of your choosing.
Let’s dissect this fantasy event using the values on the chart for Chinese customers and prospects. We’ve leveraged Health & Well-Being and Experiences. But I’d argue that the proper storytelling around this event, combined with a thoughtful lead-up and follow-through, would activate the values of Belonging, Relationships, and Possessions too.
“Now, just wait a minute...” I hear you saying to yourself, jabbing your finger at me to emphasize your point. “Who wouldn’t enjoy going to that event?” And you are not wrong. It sounds like anyone would have a good time.
But this event originated in the data. It did not start with a random idea about what might appeal to their best customers and promising prospects. It was easy to dream up an evening of mythical proportions because we had a North Star. We knew what this crowd of clotheshorses cares about, what they value most of all.
Let’s shift our focus to the USA. Have a look at the chart for American customers and prospects, and you’ll notice that, with fewer exceptions, their values align. It’s far easier for the brand to think about customers and prospects in America as one big happy commingled target audience. We see common ground on values like Experiences, Personal Responsibility, and Financial Security for example. What could we do with just those three values to appeal to long-standing fans and newcomers alike?
To drive home the point, let’s pretend we’ve been tasked with reworking the US version of the company website, and our goal today is to establish the key communication goals. What do we want people to know about the brand after visiting the website?
If Experiences, Personal Responsibility and Financial Security are the values we want to activate, it would be easy to support a key message strategy that reinforces these communication themes in as many ways as possible:
Emphasize the timelessness and durability of the clothing, and remind website visitors how these investment garments will last a lifetime. Owning clothes that are timeless and enduring is a financially smart thing to do, which appeals to those who value Financial Security.
The decision to acquire quality clothing is the opposite of disposable-fashion consumption, which means the buyer is taking Personal Responsibility for walking on the planet with a lighter footprint.
Legacy equipment and traditional techniques contribute significantly to the well-deserved reputation for quality craftsmanship. Like the complicated and oh-so-elegant Neapolitan shoulder, a trademark of Cucinelli tailoring that stretches back hundreds of years. What an Experience it is to wear clothing with this kind of artistry sewn right in.
Cucinelli’s marketing team is no stranger to these storylines of course. That’s why Cucinelli customers and prospects are attracted to the brand in the first place: because these values are already present. Remember, what we value determines everything we do, including our brand preferences.
However, with values statistically identified, and extrapolated from a dataset of half-a-million surveys, it’s now clear to the Cucinelli marketing team just how important these particular values are compared to all others. Plus, we’ve identified a particular set of values which will both solidify the support of current customers and help the brand increase market share by converting prospects into buyers.
Cucinelli’s Influenced Loyalists
Every time we analyze the data for a target audience, several segments appear. It’s like looking at any collection of things and organizing them into groups.
Think of a table covered with cards and letters you’ve received from friends and family over the years. You could organize them into piles based on who sent them to you, or the year they were written, or the color of the ink used to write them.
This is an oversimplification, but most of the time the audience segments we see in the data are easy to slot under one of the 15 Valuegraphics Archetypes. The archetypes are tribes of people who share some kind of characteristics in common: they are Workaholics, or Adventure Hunters, or Anti-materialists or etc.
What makes a Valuegraphics Profile unique for a specific brand is not just the values shared by the overall target audience, but the values for each of the audience segments. Once you understand what your segments care about, you have laser-focused insights.
Think back to those ice cream sundaes we talked about earlier. Analyzing the chocolate ice cream fans by segment would give you additional actionable insights. You’d know that 37% of your target audience likes their chocolate ice cream with sprinkles, 26% prefer nuts and whipped cream, and 17% love those little silver ball-bearing candies that look pretty but seem very likely to break your teeth.
We found a very rare segment in the data for Cucinelli prospects. We’ve only ever encountered this kind of Loyalist once before. This is a group of people who create a segment because of one thing: they want to be loyal to the same things as their heroes and mentors. We call these people the Influenced Loyalists.
Let’s say they are loyal to a trusted business coach or life mentor who wears Cucinelli. That would influence them to decide that Cucinelli was their brand too. Or perhaps they follow the work of a famous Cucinelli-clothed singer, or writer, or actor who has had a huge impact on their life. Bingo, they will want Cucinelli too. Convincing this group to buy the brand is about, at least in part, making sure they are aware of who else is wearing the brand. And given that this segment represents 17% of the Cucinelli prospect audience, activating their values could significantly boost sales.
To see how different they are from the rest of the Cucinelli audience, have a look at the chart. The differences are a gift, in this scenario, because it’s simple to zero in and activate these prospects in a precise way.
To keep things simple, let’s assume we have been assigned a broad marketing challenge: the CEO has asked us to boost engagement with the Influenced Loyalists. As a working group, we’ve looked at the data and decided to focus on the values of Loyalty, Relationships, and Personal Responsibility, as these are three uniquely dominant values for this segment.
It’s not always this clear-cut, but in this case, we know that our target audience is influenced by individuals towards whom they feel a sense of loyalty. One obvious way to engage them would be to find a brand ambassador who inspires that loyalty. Here are some guiding principles we could use to help us make a selection:
It would need to be someone who is borderless, who appeals to prospects regardless of where they live, and who has a story that shows how Loyalty reaps dividends.
Furthermore, because these prospects value Relationships, this brand ambassador should feel friendly and approachable.
And finally, it should be someone who is doing good things in the world, someone who has taken on some Personal Responsibility to make things better for people.
If the company could find a brand ambassador that meets those qualifications, this segment of the Cucinelli audience would be hard-pressed to look away. At the risk of sounding sycophantic, I wonder if it might not be Brunello Cucinelli himself? Often, when a brand pushes the Founder to the front of the room, it is because of the founder’s ego. But in this case, the data fully supports the decision.
Brunello Cucinelli is a globally-known figure, already prominent within the brands’ communication strategy. He is a leader who comes across as personable and approachable. He has spent a good portion of his life reviving small towns and giving their inhabitants a better life. If that’s not Loyalty on parade, loyalty to a set of values shared by this segment of the target audience, I’m not sure what is.
Cucinelli the company could do worse than to increase the visibility of Brunello Cucinelli significantly, and push him to the front in more ways than they do at present. The Influenced Loyalists would reward this approach in very tangible ways.