Google recently unveiled findings regarding micro-moments. These are defined as intent-driven moments of decision-making and preference shaping that can occur during a consumer journey.

So much of today's conversations center on connectivity. How connected are we? Is it too much for our lives and the lives of our kids? All this chatter about connectivity has me wondering just what it really means to be connected.

At the start of the year, it's generally standard practice for marketing organizations to do a postmortem on the previous year and think about how they're going to apply their learnings to the year ahead. But 2017 has the potential to be a very different year, as the U.S. undergoes a political transition that could have a wide-ranging impact on the economy.

As 2017 begins, we believe it's a good time to take a deep dive into which American consumers are actually buying luxuries. Listening to luxury and affluent brand marketers as we continually do, we find that many of them focus their attention and marketing efforts solely on very high-income and wealthy consumers.