• by Hal Muchnick , May 20, 2015

If you’ve ever seen “Sesame Street,” you’re probably familiar with the way it explores commonalities by showing a group of pictures wherein “one of these things is not like the other.” For example, you might see two land mammals and a fish, so, of course, you might think that it’s the fish that’s out of water. 

Or is it? What if this game were actually framed around domestic pets, and there were pictures of a tiger, a dog and a goldfish on the screen?

All brands grapple with understanding marketing context. Luxury brands, which must maintain an aura of exclusivity and stimulate enough sales to keep business humming, are especially tuned into this question.

Premium brands contracting with high-priced talent and differentiating through co-marketing partnerships need a clear window into the ever-changing interests of their target market. Typically, CRM data and past purchasing behavior cannot provide luxury brands with the real-time, comprehensive view of customer interests that help to shape just the right campaign.

Fortunately, luxury brands are quick to seek out tools that shed light on customer interests, and they know to seek out the brand adjacencies that will help them connect with their consumers.

Brand adjacencies, especially when brands leverage insights from cross-web behaviors, can provide interesting insights that tend not to be easily identified through audience targeting. Some platforms demonstrate interesting trends among luxury consumers. For example, people who buy certain luxury automobiles also display loyalty to specific airlines. Less obviously, luxury car brand enthusiasts also over-index with ESPN viewers, early adopters of new technologies, LinkedIn, and documentary-loving HBO subscribers. 

Just for fun, we looked into a couple of specific brand adjacencies, and discovered that:

• People who drive a Lexus over-index with the Sony brand, and tend to be music fans who like the latest audio technology. They also like laptops, and prefer Samsung and HP computer brands.

• People who love Prada tend to over-index with the Audi brand and compact automobiles. They are more likely to be interested in antiques and collectibles, and correlate with people who like TV shows, movies and documentaries in general, and the Netflix brand in particular.

Each of these brand adjacencies is the result of sometimes difficult-to-anticipate audience commonalities. This is why, as we sift through a deluge of data, we are not looking for a needle in a haystack so much as for hidden layers of common ground. 

Once again, a basic childhood lesson rings true. The key is to start with data that allows us to spot more specific, and less expected, commonalities as they emerge. With that, we can speak to affluent consumers in more personal ways and create true luxury experiences.