Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #391295 in Books
• Published on: 2007-03-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 272 pages

Synopsis
Come and join the hunt - secrets for success in a world of bargain seekers. This is an examination of the economic countertrend whereby middle income consumers have made the art of bargain hunting into a major business opportunity. Some people choose to pay premium prices for goods and services they care passionately about, from cars and spas to swanky coffee and faux-industrial kitchens. And some people - most people, in fact - have been choosing, since the advent of the Internet and the global marketplace, to shop lower and lower for the indispensable things in life, leaving more cash free to splurge on the luxury items they really care for. Silverstein characterises these two practices (often to be found in the same person) as "trading up" and "trading down". Some companies thrive by playing up to the high-end consumers, others by chopping down to the low - but what about the companies stuck in the middle, neither bargain-basement nor super-luxury? Without a push in the right direction there is only one outcome for these stick-in-the-middle outfits, as their market is eroded by the counterweights of the uptraders and the downtraders - change or die.

Deftly documenting the personal experiences of real consumers, especially those who belong to the middle classes of income brackets, "Treasure Hunt" offers an insightful and empathic prescription for the salvation of the mid-market company staring down the barrel of an empty shopping aisle.

Customer Reviews

A fascinating phenomenon, great research, and an over-long book
Treasure Hunt is an interesting - if slightly long - insight into the changing attitudes and decision-making processes of middle-class consumers in the United States.

Michael Silverstein - a partner at The Boston Consulting Group - is something of a guru of consumer industries, having previously penned this book's sister-title `Trading Up'. The premise underlying both works is that customers in the United States (and worldwide) are increasingly polarised in their purchasing patterns - that is, they `trade-up' and `trade-down'. According to Silverstein and his colleagues at BCG, markets can no-longer be stratified simply, with rich customers consistently buying premium goods and poorer customers always buying cheap goods. Instead, it is common to see supermarket baskets containing both premium and value goods, and to see families who scrimp and save through the year to splurge on a five-star holiday in the Bahamas. According to Silverstein, these trends have profound implications for the strategies of businesses in a wide range of consumer industries.

About half of `Treasure Hunt' is composed of profiles of individual consumers, aiming to illuminate how they weigh costs and benefits to make decisions across a wide range of goods and services. In each case, the consumer exhibits the key trading up/down behaviours. For example, there is a fashion executive who spends little on food for fear of being alone and poor in her old age, yet spends over $1,000 per month on new clothes. These profiles are lucidly written, engaging and most of all enlightening. Even if the reader rejects the premise that customer behaviour is changing as Silverstein suggests, the up-close-and-personal insights of customers' decision-making are extremely valuable.

The rest of the book concerns itself with the companies that serve these customers, with case studies of HEB, Bath & Body Works, LG and Fleet Boston, amongst others. Like the consumer portraits, these profiles are short and focussed, giving an insight into how each company has responded to the new consumer challenges they face, and charting their successes and failures.

`Treasure Hunt' documents an undoubtedly fascinating phenomenon, and I would heartily recommend the book to anyone working in consumer-focussed industries. I very much enjoyed the book, but do have three reservations. Firstly, like many such business books, the key points could almost certainly have been condensed into a 30 page article without sacrificing much of the texture which is found in the book's 304 pages. Second, although the consumer research in the book is incredibly rich, it is mainly qualitative. I would have preferred to see more quantitative evidence from large-n surveys to support the author's hypotheses. Finally, I felt that the book would benefit from a more rigorous examination of the underlying customer psychology/sociology that is driving the changes in behaviour.