But it also has to be careful not to fall into the trap of emerging consumer brands that end up aggressively spending to expand into new markets — especially ones that are outside of their sweet spot, which is often urban markets.
Like many European luxury brands, Dior, which reported double-digit growth in China for the first three months of the year, looks to emerging consumer markets as a major source of revenue, and it is eager to avoid causing offense.
He forecasts that by 2014, they will have overtaken both American and Japanese consumers, becoming the world's leading luxury shoppers, yielding 24% of global revenues.These emerging consumers have a big appetite for the top luxury brands and the owners of those brands are increasingly keen to oblige.
"A lot of the poor — call them emerging consumers — get inundated with crummy stuff," he told me.
There is also the possibility that the DECE is making a flawed bet on the direction of technology and emerging consumer habits.
Like Kodak, LG.Philips is attacking both ends of China's emerging consumer class.
As an Olympic host for the first time, China wants to be seen as capable and friendly, more than the source of inexpensive goods for the First World, more than an emerging consumer of oil and air and water.
The use of proximity as a conceptual framework allows distinguishing between spatial (i.e. Euclidean distance) and relational (cognitive, organizational, institutional and social) understandings of emerging producer-consumer relations.
The willingness of people to buy such stuff, combined with the vast new markets of millions of emerging middle-class consumers in China, India and elsewhere, has boosted the stars' brands beyond anything that was possible in the past.
