Rocket

Sometimes you’ve got to tell consumers what they want.

What do successful brands have in common?

They know that consumers aren’t interested in abstract concepts like performance statistics and technical specifications; customers want to see and touch products that they can relate to in an instant. To accomplish this, brands need to create products that aren’t just innovative, but also intuitive.

In fact, you can open your customers’ eyes to a new world by simply forming a new market. Just take the serial entrepreneur Les Wexner, who, in the 1980s, identified the huge gap between the luxury and budget markets for women’s undergarments.

Wexner noticed that although women wanted to be sexy, they couldn’t do so without breaking the bank. It was this realization that led him to found Victoria’s Secret, a brand that endeavored to forge a new market for glamorous women’s underwear that was neither too cheap nor over-the-top luxurious.

By forging a middle ground in the market, he enabled countless women to rediscover underwear as lingerie – and the business results were incredible.

But even if you have a stellar brand and a lucrative market, you should never be satisfied; it’s essential to continually reappraise your market and reinvent your brand. For instance, when Victoria’s Secret’s annual revenue stabilized at $2 billion, Wexner went looking for ways to rebrand the company.

His search led him to hire the authors, who conducted 100 interviews with young women to gather data on their relationships to the brand.

The results?

Most of the women were only wearing Victoria’s Secret products on the weekend and would rather sacrifice glamour for comfort during the week. So, armed with this information, Wexner developed models that were both sexy and comfortable. Helped along by this change, the company’s annual revenue is now over $8 billion!