Brand Idiomatics Puts Consumption in a Whole New Context.

Industry Vet Behind "Alpha Consumer" Launches New Approach to Tracking and Forecasting Long-cycle Consumer Shifts

Making Brands Mean More in the New Consumer Idiom

NEWTOWN, Pa. -- As the 2008 Democratic Convention plays out in Denver this week, the founding partners of Brand Idiomatics are reaching back to another presidential election to explain why the focus and approach of this new consultancy stands apart in the "me, too" cottage industry of consumer insight and brand strategy gurus.

It's the context, stupid.

The brain child of nationally recognized media and consumer trends authority Bill Melnick -- who as Director of Marketing at Vanity Fair helped make the term "Alpha Consumer" part of the modern marketing lexicon -- Brand Idiomatics helps marketers define changes in the context in which consumers experience a brand, and translate brand messages into the right idiom for the new context. According to Melnick, understanding Consumption Context[R] is a glaring unmet need in the industry -- and a rapidly expanding imperative for marketers across every category.

"Marketers have spent billions of dollars researching their customers, collecting daily sales data, investing in their retail environments, innovating their products and communicating their brand propositions," says Melnick, "yet they have failed to understand and keep track of the most important influence on their businesses, the broader context through which their customers consider, compare and commit to their brand."

As Melnick explains it, marketers who view shifts in Consumption Context as a function of the economy alone are being dangerously myopic. Indeed, the core Brand Idiomatics premise holds that a convergence of economic, cultural, social and political trends are driving wholesale change in consumer behavior and consumption patterns -- and creating a whole new set of business issues for brands. "The brands that can understand what this amalgam of external factors means in terms of consumer choices will be the brands that mean more in the new Consumption Context," says Melnick.

Tracking and Forecasting Consumption Context

The key Brand Idiomatics product offer is also its key differentiator -- a proprietary process that combines traditional category and audience data with non-endemic, econometric inputs -- including economic, cultural, political and forward-looking indicators -- to track and predict long-cycle shifts in consumer outlook and behaviors, identify the inherent business issues, define the new brand message idiom and develop the best strategies for the business need and the consumption context.

"As far as I know, we are the only game in town offering this depth of contextual analysis," says Melnick. "I know that in over three decades on both the agency and client side of the table -- including leading landmark campaigns at CNBC, Vanity Fair and Merrill Lynch -- I've never seen anything like the Brand Idiomatics approach and offer."

At the core of this offer are two diagnostic platforms. The Brand Idiomatics Consumption Context Index published quarterly, benchmarks and tracks changes in consumer outlook, values, behaviors and purchases.

The Q3 '08 BI Consumption Context Index will be available on the Brand Idiomatics web site by September 30th. http://www.brandidiomatics.com/Tracking_and_Forecasting.html

BI bookends the expository CCI with its Consumption Context Predictive Index, available exclusively to BI clients. The CCPI puts marketers ahead of the context curve as consumers continue wholesale reorganization of priorities and lifestyle.

Since opening its doors in Bucks County, PA, a bedroom community for the New York advertising community, Brand Idiomatics has been tapped by a number of regional and national agency and consumer brands to support 2009 strategic planning efforts.

Joining Melnick in servicing the rapidly growing client list is BI founding partner Isabelle Gauvry, an award winning communications strategist and former National Director of Media Strategy for Omnicom's Porter Novelli agency brand.

Summing up Brand Idiomatic's potential impact, Melnick says, "Brand Idiomatics represents the transition from targeting humans as consumers, to understanding consumers as humans."

BRAND IDIOMATICS, located in Newtown, PA, is a new breed of marketing consultancy that combines traditional category and audience data with non-endemic econometric inputs - including economic, cultural, political and forward-looking indicators - to track and predict long-cycle shifts in consumer outlook and behaviors, identify the inherent business issues, and develop the best strategies for the business need and the consumption context.