• Satisfying needs is no longer a strategic objective. Nowadays, innovations are quickly copied and imitated, so they are no longer an asset for brands. Even communication concepts are copied.
• Today's consumer can hardly see the difference. Therefore, it is high time the fundamental paradigm of marketing was overhauled ? that of satisfying consumers' needs. And if we don't aim at needs, what do we aim at?
• These issues will have consequences for industrial and retail strategies. How can we work with the brand? How should we communicate and which POP and promotion types should be developed in keeping with the essence of each category? How can emotions be controlled at the time of purchase?

Georges Chetochine is irritating.

• In 1979, he forecast (and nobody believed him) that the own labels being launched would eventually cannibalise the market.
• When Georges Chetochine asserted and demonstrated years later that the hard discount approach would prevail over all the other retail approaches, nobody really took him seriously.
• What's the situation today? Own labels now fill most superstore shelves and hard discount stores have the upper hand in FMCG sales.
• And these are only some of his numerous predictions. Many of them can be found in his book ?Brands in Disarray?.

Georges Chetochine is irritating because he has got it right in many cases.

• Consumers have everything or practically everything. They have too much of everything. Their needs are satisfied, saturated. Having said this, they still have cravings that leave them increasingly frustrated. Revival of the economic machine depends on companies' capacity to provide the response to frustrations rather than needs.
• Georges Chetochine does not use conventional marketing tools; he relies on his observation and analysis of consumer behaviour. He works like an anthropologist.

• "We in marketing made many promises: that you would be happy, that your breasts wouldn't sag... Many lies have been told. Consumers no longer believe in advertising and are fed up with interruption marketing"
• ? "Kotler's marketing worked because there was nothing in the old days and we were very happy to have brands. You had a choice of soap or Lux soap, petrol or Shell petrol. The brand gave you the notion of quality. But now there are no longer bad products, they simply don't exist. And if you want to buy soap, just plain soap no longer exists: it's Lux, Dove or whatever, but always a brand".
• Consumers no longer identify strongly with brands and are hostile to advertising: they will make their choices at the point of sale. Nestlé has reduced its media budget by 50% and redirected the money to points of sale - for that is where the alchemy occurs.

• We have to create an anxiety. Consumers purchase because of their emotions. People will pay the price if they are anxious. Yes, that's manipulation. But that's how it was when we said that soap X would make you 20 years younger.
• Producing anxieties means asking ?Don't you think your skin is slightly flawed? Well I have just the product for that? But the advertisers do not want to work with anxieties because they want to build an image. They still cling to the psychoanalytical idea of what's wonderful, fabulous, that "everything's doing fine".
• The two moments of truth are :
  1. In front of the shelf
  2. When they try the product.