Luxury Institute Survey Finds America's Wealthy Rate Bang & Olufsen, Nakamichi and Sony Top Luxury Video Brands.

NEW YORK -- As America's wealthy rush to replace old mega-sized tube televisions with new flat panel, high-definition models, Bang and Olufsen clinched the category's most prestigious brand rating in the latest Consumer Video Luxury Brand Status Index (LBSI) survey from the New York City-based Luxury Institute. The Struer, Denmark based brand, which recently took top honors in a Luxury Institute Audio products survey, outperformed the competition by a dramatic nine point margin. Nakamichi was rated second followed by Sony in third.

"The Consumer Audio category is comprised mostly of high-quality, but highly-commoditized brands from Asia," said Milton Pedraza, CEO, the Luxury Institute. "However, Bang & Olufsen, with a score of 80, clearly stands out from the field as a true luxury brand with unsurpassed design aesthetics and state-of-the-art technology. The brand took top honors in perceived quality, uniqueness, status and most importantly, in making customers feel special across the entire experience. Its price worthiness score was 11 points higher than any other brand in its category, indicating that consumers are willing to pay far more for great products and experiences than most audio executives perceive. Today wealthy consumers determine what is a brand via their ratings and rankings. The consumer video category has a great opportunity to bring in leadership that is truly customer experience-focused rather than product-focused."

Twenty-five brands were rated including: (alphabetically) Bang and Olufsen, Daewoo, Dell, Epson, Fujitsu, Gateway, HP (Hewlett-Packard), Hitachi, JVC, LG, Mitsubishi, NEC, Nakamichi, Panasonic, Philips, Pioneer, Polaroid, RCA, Samsung, Sanyo, Sharp, Sony, Toshiba, Westinghouse, and Zenith.

The proprietary Luxury Brand Status Index (LBSI) is the only measure of the value of leading luxury brands to wealthy Americans, based on statistically meaningful data collected from wealthy consumers themselves. The LBSI incorporates four main "pillars" of value: consistently superior quality, uniqueness and exclusivity, enhanced social status, and the ability of a brand to make a customer "feel special." Seven point scale ratings are converted to a 0-100 scale.

In addition to individual and composite metrics by age, gender, income and net worth, the survey measures a brand's ability to merit a significant premium price and the correlation of price premium worthiness with the composite index of the four critical factors. Another critical metric feature of the research is a rating by wealthy consumers of a brand's erosion or enhancement over the past year.

Using LBSI, the Luxury Institute surveyed a nationally representative sample of more than 400 households with a minimum of $200,000 in gross annual household income and minimum household net worth of $750,000 (including home equity). Brands rated are selected with the assistance of leading industry experts including manufacturers, retailers and journalists.

About the Luxury Institute

The Luxury Institute is the uniquely independent and objective research institution that focuses solely on the top 10 percent of America's wealthy. The Institute provides a portfolio of proprietary publications and research that guide and educate high net-worth individuals and the companies that cater to them on leading edge trends, wealthy consumer rankings and ratings of luxury brands, and best practices. Publications include the monthly Wealth Report, the Luxury Brand Status Index surveys, the Luxury Best Practices surveys and the Luxury Consumer Experience Index surveys. To reach the Luxury institute, please call 646-792-2669 or go to www.luxuryinstitute.com.