Treasure Hunt: Inside the Mind of the New Consumer by Michael J. Silverstein, John Butman

From the Publisher

A BMW in a Costco parking lot?

A working class family with a 50 inch plasma TV?

A 27-year-old Japanese administrative assistant with a collection of Coach purses?

An 87-year-old retiree in Ohio exclaiming the value of Aldi brand honey?

What's going on in the mind of the new consumer?

Today's consumers can seem impossible to understand, and even harder to please. For instance, the average mall shopper will spend her $100, then leave when she hits that limit. She'll probably buy shoes rather than clothing, because she doesn't want to think about her dress size. And the store most likely to get her money isn't the one with the nicest display or the deepest discounts... it's the one closest to her parking spot.

In his research with dozens of leading companies, Michael J. Silverstein has interviewed thousands of customers, extracting fascinating patterns about what really drives their purchase decisions. His first book, the acclaimed bestseller Trading Up, has taught a generation of marketers about the "new luxury" phenomenon, and why consumers will happily pay a steep premium for goods and services that are emotionally satisfying, from golf clubs to bathroom hardware to beauty products.

But Trading Up only revealed part of the story of the new consumer. The same middle class consumers who are happily trading up at Victoria's Secret and Panera are going on treasure hunts at Costco and Home Depot. And they are often getting as much emotional satisfaction in the discount stores as in the luxury stores. Silverstein's new book explains how the new consumer approaches bargain hunting, and how even the most mundane shopping - for things like paper towels and pet food -- have become an adventure rather than a tedious chore.

It turns out that, in just about every consumer category, both the high end and the low end are growing and innovation rich. Many middle class consumers gladly spend $5.00 a day for a vente Starbucks latte; others spend 40 cents a day on home brewed coffee, feel good about their frugality, and save up the difference to buy Apple's newest Nano. Treasure Hunt explains the success of companies as diverse as Dollar General, LG, H. E. Butt, Ebay, Commerce Bank, and Tchibo.

Beware: in our bifurcated global market, businesses need a clear strategy for aiming high or low, while staying away from the treacherous middle, where so many have recently stumbled. If your offering isn't exciting enough to inspire trading up, but not enough of a bargain to satisfy the treasure hunters, you'll have no emotional connection with your target audience. And, like General Motors or Sears in recent years, your tried-and-true marketing strategies will go into a severe stall.

Treasure Hunt takes us into the homes of real people making real decisions, and into the CEO's offices of innovative companies finding new ways to accommodate them. Written with the same flair, empathy, and intelligence that made Trading Up an instant business classic, this book is an essential guide to the moods and habits of the constantly changing consumer.

Washington Post

Silverstein is persuasive -- and entertaining

Wall Street Journal

Treasure Hunt has a strong sense of the shopping zeitgeist.

Harvard Business Review

Treasure Hunt...is not just about saving money-it's about gaining control, achieving goals, and attaining the things that matter...

USA Today

Silverstein's book will...help entrepreneurs get rich, and in the process, enrich the lives of "average consumers.

Financial Times

...businesses need to steel themselves...The companies that win will have displayed a clear treasure map at the front door.

Knight Ridder

There is a treasure trove of premium advice and valuable information in Treasure Hunt for anyone in any business...

Bloomberg News

...a fun, savvy book.

HBS Working Knowledge

Treasure Hunt is very well written and ultimately convincing in its thesis...

Jack Covert Selects

...As a merchant, I recommend this book.

Library Journal

Silverstein (senior v.p., Boston Consulting Group, coauthor with Neil Fiske, Trading Up: Why Consumers Want New Luxury Goods-and How Companies Create Them) and Butman (Juran) have produced essential reading for those who currently work in marketing or are marketing majors in college. Engaging and loaded with statistics and interviews with consumers and CEOs, the text provides an excellent inside look into how today's consumers are embarking on "treasure hunts" for quality products at reasonable prices. While Trading Up noted the trend of middle-class consumers pursuing high-end goods, here the authors study consumers who will go on "treasure hunts" for low-end items as well, at such stores as Costco and Wal-Mart. They trade up or down to obtain the goods and services they want at the price they desire. As a result, many notable companies have changed their product lines and repositioned themselves in the marketplace to meet new challenges and increase their market share. The authors look at such examples as Aldi, LG, and Dollar General, to name just a few, and point out that other companies, e.g., Sears, Ford, and General Motors, who pursue neither the well-packaged bargain nor the inspiring luxury presentation, continue to lose market share owing to their "middle" position in the marketplace. This book should be part of any corporate or academic library as well as any public library business collection.-Diane Fulkerson, Univ. of West Georgia, Carrollton Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Soundview Summary - Soundview Executive Book Summaries

In the U.S. and around the world, consumer markets are bifurcating into two rapidly growing pools of spending. At the high end, consumers are trading up, willing to pay a premium for top quality, emotionally rich, high-margin products and services. At the low end, consumers are trading down to spend the least amount possible on basic, low-cost goods that still deliver quality, reliability and increasingly, an element of style. In between these spending poles lies a vast expanse of mediocre, often low-margin goods that lack distinctive emotional appeal or better value than their cheaper competitors.

Companies that have profited for years by selling mid-priced products to middle-class consumers suddenly find themselves facing “death in the middle.” Companies that succeed in this bifurcated market are those who understand the attitudes, behaviors and values of middle-market consumers who are driving this metamorphosis.

For today’s consumers, shopping has become a treasure hunt - a constant search through the world’s vast and fluid store of goods and services to find the perfect value every time. Such consumers trade up in some categories, trade down in most, and mix upscale with downscale products to create a customized lifestyle.

The Dollar Store
Retailers who have found a treasure hunting format that combines hard discounts with a shopping experience familiar to Americans include the “dollar stores” like Family Dollar, Dollar General and Dollar Tree. In 2004, 66% of households report having shopped at a dollar store, and higher-income households are the fastest-growing segment of customers. The success of Dollar General and of the dollar store category in general, is having a major effect on the trillion-dollar trading down market.

The Hotel Industry: Moving in Both Directions
When hotels experienced a drop in business after 9/11, a truth about the industry was revealed - despite the glamour of high-end hotels and destinations, riches are also found at the bottom of the market. Although some hotel companies abandoned expansion or improvement plans or unloaded properties after 2001, others followed a trading-up or trading-down strategy, adding rooms and building brands that would appeal to specific segments of the market.

All hotel owners are looking for ways to differentiate and respond to the bifurcation of the market. The worst place to be is in the middle, where average returns are below the cost of capital. New capacity coming on in the mid-price segment is likely to earn a negative internal rate of return. At the high end, a bottle royale is developing. There are sure to be casualties, especially among the small chains not sharply focused on either the business or leisure traveler. The best place to be is at the bottom of the market.

EBay: The World’s Biggest Treasure Hunt
The excitement of going on the prowl is also what’s behind every yard sale and flea market, including the biggest and most extravagantly profitable embodiment of the concept, eBay.

After just seven years of operation, eBay had created a market value of $42 billion, which is greater than the entire value of the department-store industry of the United States, which has been operating for a century. What eBay offers is an online community that brings 336,000 registered stores worldwide, many small or geographically isolated, into one global marketplace.

The majority of items sold on eBay are inexpensive. Excluding autos and real estate, we estimate the average eBay selling price is $36, so the population for buyers represents all income levels. Most users come from middle income households who shop there for treasure.

Bath & Body Works
The ability to understand value factors like fear or hope that cannot be quantified or plugged into a spreadsheet is driving the success of Neil Fiske, CEO of Bath & Body Works. (BBW) For over a decade, BBW has been successful selling mid-price body and personal-care products for women.

BBW is positioned as a masstige (mass market/prestige) brand, based on products that are a step above the drug store and a step below the department store. For millions of women, BBW products fit neatly into their personal value calculus, delivering a combination of wholesomeness, effectiveness, and personal indulgence at a price high enough to be exciting, but not so high as to be unaffordable, even on a middle-class income.

Retailers Who Can Also Get Left in the Dust
As Wal-Mart and other winners have led a retailing revolution - achieving 20 to 40 percent annual growth and shareholder return two to four times the market average - the traditional grocery chain has lost 30 share points and the traditional department store as many as 50 share points. Zayre, Ames, Bradlees, Caldor and Venture Stores, have all been left in the dust.

The conventional grocery industry has been most transformed. Wal-Mart is responsible for much of this shift. Their super center delivers higher store traffic, drives merchandise sales, and increases per-customer visits. When you earn gross margin 50 percent higher per square foot than competitors, that can translate into four times the profits per store.

Avoiding the Seemingly Unavoidable
The single most important early-warning signal that you may be in danger of getting left behind as a retailer is a drop in share of “primary shop.” When a consumer ranks you as their first choice for purchasing goods in a particular category, you enjoy the bulk of sales and margin that customer has to offer. This is critical because retail is a very leveraged business - space occupancy, staffing, and inventory are essentially fixed costs - and a loss of as little as 10 percent of volume can cut profitability in half.

Don’t Wait
Taking action means innovating, not just more of the same, or considering acquisitions or increasing your advertising spending. Think about innovation as a series of waves of reinvention and change, each lasting three to five years, and no longer. Copyright © 2007 Soundview Executive Book Summaries

Library Journal

Essential reading for those who currently work in marketing...

Publishers Weekly

In their bestselling Trading Up, Silverstein and Neil Fiske explained why people are willing to spend beyond their means for certain premium goods. But that's only half the story: as middle-class customers splurge on lingerie and appliances, they're bargain-hunting for everything else. Companies will thrive, Silverstein argues, by catering to the penny-pinching impulses of consumers, or by "spanning the poles" and appealing to both the high and low ends while avoiding anything else-there's only "death in the middle." The book's profiles of individuals who splurge-and-scrimp and case studies of companies that have successfully adapted to the polarization of the marketplace show the key to survival is to offer the perception of good value for money and an emotionally satisfying experience. This is where the book becomes a tad creepy: Silverstein analyzes female consumers' relationships with their mothers and attributes an advertising executive's "lack of a father's love, a social-climbing mother and several failed relationships" as causes of her binge-spending and scrimping. Silverstein's guide to cashing in on the top and the bottom is intelligent without becoming mercenary; business owners will take notice.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

What People Are Saying

Douglas R. Conant
Douglas R. Conant, President and CEO, Campbell Soup Company
The real treasure here is the thinking of Michael Silverstein...Powerfully insightful and approachable.

Product Details

• Table of Contents
• Forewords & Introductions

Table of Contents

Forewords & Introductions

Introduction

One of our first visits was to a sixtyish woman named Lillie, who lived in a mobile home park near Tampa, Florida. She welcomed us in and we perched ourselves on folding chairs while Lillie dropped into a La-Z-Boy recliner. I asked Lillie to tell us a little bit about herself and she launched into the story of her childhood in Mississippi, her first marriage, the birth of her two kids, her hardworking life, her divorce and remarriage.

Just as Lillie was telling us about the sudden death of her second husband, an enormous cockroach emerged from the kitchenette and ambled into the living room. My client and I noticed it at exactly the same moment. We looked at each other, looked at the cockroach, and then looked back at each other, wondering whether we should mention it or pretend we hadn't noticed.

But Lillie spotted the cockroach, too. "Damn!" she growled. She leapt out of the La-Z-Boy, tore open a kitchen cabinet, and pulled out a can of my client's very own brand of bug spray. She closed in for the attack, bent over, aimed the nozzle at the roach, and nailed it. I counted -one-one-thousand, two-one-thousand, three-one-thousand, four-one-thousand, five-one-thousand—as the roach jerked into a deathly paroxysm and the spray formed a toxic puddle around him.

"Take that, you bastard," Lillie said.

My client and I looked at her with raised eyebrows.

"Roaches!" she said with disgust. "Remind me of my first husband." She placed the rim of the can on the carcass and bisected it with a definitive crunch.

What did we learn from our visits? First, that customers use far more spray than necessary. More important, Lillie demonstrated that even a utilitarian product like bug spray can have deeply emotional, even primal, meaning. Our visit with Lillie became a reference point for the bug spray organization as it created news and improvements for its products.

Over the twenty-five years since that visit with Lillie, I have spent a great deal of time listening to consumers, watching them in action, and gaining insights that can be applied to business strategy. I have seen that consumers will always "trade down" and buy the cheapest product in a category if suppliers fail to deliver a stream of innovation and build loyalty based on product superiority. I have come to understand the constant trade-offs that middle-class consumers make in the purchase of goods, how many buying decisions they face in a day, and how much competition there is for their attention. I have come to appreciate how sophisticated consumers are. They have access to a wealth of product information. They do not tolerate poor quality in a product without complaint and a vow that they will "never again" buy it. I know that household budgets are tight and that they are predominantly controlled by women. That's because women, since going to work in large numbers, are responsible for 100 percent of the growth in household income. Women manage the family budget like an industrial purchasing agent who occasionally turns into a hedonist. The home, although still a family haven, has also become a pressure cooker. This smart, educated middle-class population—highly stressed and faced with tremendous choice—increasingly buys at both ends of the price spectrum, while ignoring the middle.

Middle-class consumers have embarked on a relentless, continuous treasure hunt. The treasure hunt is a real and global phenomenon that presents challenges to both retailers and their suppliers, and has delivered death in the middle to the average, middlemarket producer—companies like Chevrolet and Kraft.

In Trading Up, my co-author Neil Fiske and I explored one aspect of the treasure hunt—how middle-market consumers would distort their spending to buy premium goods that were highly meaningful to them. The book originated, interestingly enough, in a series of conversations we had with young women about their underwear. During the course of that consumer discovery work for Victoria's Secret, Neil and I developed an idea that we called "the ladder of benefits"—an ascending scale of technical, functional, and emotional benefits. A genuine technical difference leads to an advantage in functional performance, which can ultimately result in a positive emotional response, attachment to the product, and brand loyalty. The combination delivers the potential for the company to charge a price premium.

With the ladder of benefits in mind, we worked with the leaders of Victoria's Secret to help create a new line of lingerie called Body by Victoria. It offered technical, functional, and emotional benefits, and Victoria's Secret priced it at a premium to middle-market lingerie. The new line took off and quickly grew into a $500 million business. Its success was evidence that, if you get the ladder of benefits right, consumers will not only pay a premium for your product or service, they will even distort their spending patterns to do so.

At first, we thought this might be an anomaly and applicable only in the fashion industry. But we researched many other categories of consumer goods, including cars, wine, spirits, and home goods, and found that the desire to move up the ladder of benefits was a broad phenomenon. In category after category, up to 20 percent of the market was in goods that sold at a premium of 50 to 200 percent to midprice offerings. We estimated that "trading up" in 2002 accounted for about $300 billion in annual sales in about twenty-three major categories in the United States. Since then, it has grown to over $500 billion in this country and about the same amount in Europe.

In my work with clients and consumers since 2002, it became increasingly obvious that the trading-up phenomenon, although extremely significant, is actually just one element of the bigger and more important story of the treasure hunt: the bifurcation of the consumer goods market into trading-up and trading-down segments, with death in the middle.

Thus, this book deepens the inquiry and broadens the scope of the work begun in Trading Up, with two main purposes. First, it is to help the reader better understand middle-market consumers, who are too often ignored or misinterpreted by businesspeople, the press, and others. Some economists even characterize them as spendthrifts and the culprits behind the U.S. trade deficit. I see middle-class consumers as essentially hardworking and noble people who must deal with an increasing amount of pressure to make choices for their families and themselves. They are generally wise about their spending, although they sometimes carry more debt than they would like to and accumulate more goods than necessary. I hope the stories in this book will bring them more respect and understanding. You'll meet:

• Alice and Ben Nelson. The family went on an austerity budget to afford four TVs as a Christmas gift.
• Sarah and Rick Montfort. Sarah drives across town to save a few pennies on chicken. Rick blows $500 a month on golf and poker.
• Lauren James. Age thirty, she invests heavily in clothing and personal care, and saves money by eating Cheez-Its at the 7-Eleven.
• Masako Tanaka. One of millions of young Japanese "office ladies," she lives with her parents and spends liberally on fashion, entertainment, and travel.
• Peter Kim. He earns about $80,000 as a waiter, but feels left behind by friends who are starting families and buying big homes.
• Hilda Schmidt. With a household spending allowance of €600 per month, she stocks up on goods in case of an emergency or shortfall of cash.
• Stephanie Granby. She fell in love with scarves in her early twenties, but couldn't afford to indulge her interest—until she discovered eBay.

• Aldi. The extraordinarily successful hard discount chain, founded in Germany, and now catching on throughout Europe and in the United States.
• Bath & Body Works. The unit of Limited Brands that has repositioned itself to meet the changing value calculus of women's beauty.
• Best Value Inn. The fastest-growing hotel chain in the United States delivers a quality room at a trading-down price.
• Dollar General. One of the many dollar chains that are proliferating throughout the United States with its own funky interpretation of the treasure hunt.
• eBay. The world's largest garage sale and the most dramatic manifestation of the consumer-driven market.
• LG. The Korean maker of home electronics and appliances that started at the bottom end of the market and now "spans the poles."
• McDonald's. McDonald's revitalized its burger and fries and kept the Happy Meal from becoming just "utility fuel."

I know from close experience the daunting challenges that businesspeople face in today's dynamic, almost vibrating consumer goods markets. I respect those leaders who find a way to create products, brands, and companies that connect with consumers and energize categories and transform markets, because—in the whirl of meeting investor expectations, complying with Sarbanes-Oxley requirements, and motivating the workforce—it is easy to "forget" the consumer and lose touch with the market. I also hope the ideas in this book will help entrepreneurs get rich and, in the process, enrich the lives of "average consumers."