Last week, Guy Champniss (Director of Business Insights, Havas Media) and I attended the IHT Sustainable Luxury Summit at The Imperial, New Delhi. The conference attracted high level speakers and an audience of over 450 delegates.
We participated in a session called Perception & Reality moderated by Len Apcar, Deputy Managing Editor & Chief Editor for Asia, IHT and used the opportunity to talk about Sustainable Futures 09, the latest piece of research from Havas Media Intelligence on consumer perception of sustainability.
Using new data from the research gathered during the economic downturn, we showed that sustainability issues featured in four of the top five concerns across all markets in the research and that emerging markets such as China, India and Brazil are more concerned with these issues than developed markets such as US, UK and Germany. In fact, consumers from emerging markets actively reward environmentally and socially responsible companies.
We highlighted that luxury brands looking to emerging market consumers to provide much-needed growth to offset large declines in traditional US and European markets, need to be acutely aware of the new brand drivers that are increasingly influencing the purchasing/repurchasing choices of these emerging markets consumers.
In addition to high levels of engagement with traditional luxury brand drivers like heritage and quality, consumers in emerging markets are increasingly showing extremely high levels of engagement with other issues, for example, the area of sustainability. Retailers that move quickly to capitalise on this, will be more adept at building greater brand equity and thus greater commercial success, both in the medium and long term.
Look out for some photos from the event in the coming days!
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