Entry 10: Consumer Preference and Utility

Skechers doesn't just launch a new product and use heavy promotion to expect consumers to like the product they are providing. Because they believe that their products are most attractive to the 12~24 year olds, teen to young adults, they base their marketing and promotion around that age group, finding what they like and how to appeal to that certain group of customers. The strategy used is to associate the Skechers products with coolness and fashion because that creates a sense of model and an image people strive to have. Adults also purchase these products for the same reason. Instead of trying to look like their peers, they try to look young and cool like the new generation. Association is very important because, for example, your reference group, a group of people you admire and model yourself after, wears a certain type of product, It is seemingly suggesting that wearing those product is to be like who you admire. They also place ads in fashion and cool magazines that would usually attract the very people that they are targeting. To know what the people like, they have researchers blending into the crowd they are targeting for observation; they also have sampling groups that represents the target that provides feedbacks. To differentiate, they segment the market so that they accurately represent the target consumers they are trying to appeal to, creating a relationship of identity. I think it's not so much as to increase the utility but Skechers is actually looking for the preference of items that would generate the most utility instead of making their items seem to have more utility. However, through public relation, identity, and promotion, it sometimes increases the utility when we are willing to spend more because we believe we get more benefit from this brand because of their successful marketing. Of course we don't consciously think that, we think that the shoes are the best shoes out there BECAUSE of the successful marketing and that urges us to give more weight. Iphones and Macbooks have a high utility for me. Of course it's high because it is genuinely very easy to use. However, a lot of the utility also comes from group identity. Now that macbook is becoming almost universal, where there's PC there are usually Macbooks. This creates a sense that Macbooks are better, and thus more utility because we feel better about them. Diamonds are something that has too much utility in my opinion. I believe that the superficial value exceeds over the real value of diamond and that marketing plays a much larger role than the actual benefit.