The first thing a lot of people think about when they hear about customer collaboration and co-creation is, "That's great. But I work in a very complex industry. There's no way this will ever work for me." However, Harley-Davidson, BMW and Ducati have all found success in running customer collaboration programs. Personal transportation is a lifestyle-intensive market segment in the same way that clothing, cosmetics or electronics are. They help people define who they are and show that to the world around them. What we can learn from these leading companies can be extrapolated to other luxury goods industries to …

I was talking to a friend the other day about her daughter's holiday wish list. A nice young girl from a nice family, not ostentatious at all. And yet, there at the top of her list were items from high-end brands like Lululemon, Michael Kors, David Yurman. Standard brands we associate with young, teenage girls, right? Wrong.

The fourth quarter is always the busiest time for consumer marketers. They spend more on media and, in theory, they drive more money through increased holiday sales. This may result in high ROI, but in today's fractured media landscape, a marketer needs to go much further to better understand how each channel affected the affluent consumer's path to conversion. There's no better time to remember that proper marketing analysis requires an attribution strategy, and marketers who want to do attribution correctly need to get involved early in the process, building their quarterly strategies with robust post-campaign attribution in mind.

This month's column builds upon last month's column, "If You Think All Millionaires Are The Same, Think Again," and delivers our current insights about how millionaires differ from the average American in the way they communicate with other consumers and how they view and hear marketers' messages and advertising. The wealthy, defined for this column as America's millionaires with personal liquid assets of $1 million or more, differ from the average American, and they differ from each other as well, especially when you look at them across generations.