Connecting your brand to your consumer's Lifestyle

Three Lifestyle Brands marketers can look to for inspiration:

It’s not about products; it’s about experiences and how things make us feel.

Gone are the days when you could create a really beautiful ad and serve it in front of your consumers’ face like a carrot dangling on a stick. Even if it’s the perfect ad — being served up to the perfectly targeted person — marketers need to do more: they need to create the perfect experience for their consumers. Who does a fantastic job of this? Lifestyle brands!

By definition, lifestyle brands have a deep understanding of their target consumer’s way of life. They understand the type of experiences that they crave, as well as the people, places and things that motivate and inspire them. It’s not simply a compilation of their demographic data with some key “interests” and “likes” thrown into the targeting keyword list — it’s understanding their consumers fully as an anthropologist would understand a culture.

And then once that is determined, it’s about inserting your brand — not necessarily your product — into that culture so your brand and products become key contributors to your consumer’s way of life.

Think of traditional marketing as the YouTube pre-roll ad, and then the lifestyle brand marketing as the actual YouTube video your consumer is trying to find in the first place. Your consumer is looking for the YouTube video because they want to share it out on their social channels as a means of demonstrating who they are and how they want to be seen to their friends.

With that extremely tall order in mind, here are some exemplary lifestyle brands that can inspire you to push your brand — whatever brand that may be — further into your consumer’s culture and way of life.

Nike+

Nike launched its fitness tracker app, Nike+, a few years ago now, but the core idea of it is still just as compelling. Not only did it focus on the lifestyle of the consumer, in this case running, but it also worked to optimize the experience by allowing people to share their running routes. But the really smart part was bringing in the community. Once someone “liked” a running route, the user would hear cheers and applause in their headphones — a great motivator when you’re struggling through the last mile. What Nike did here was remove itself from the experience while also incorporating the encouragement of users’ friends and optimizing their run.

Sour Patch Kids

How did a piece of candy become a social currency for fans of indie musicians in Brooklyn and Austin? Through the clever creation of The Patch. The Patch is a brownstone building in Brooklyn, the #BrooklynPatch, and a residence in Austin, #AustinPatch was also built so that traveling musicians could stay free of charge for as long as they want. Instead of marketing the brand as a lifestyle a person could assimilate into, they reversed it and structured their brand to assimilate into an already existing lifestyle their target audience thought was “cool”: an awesome music scene of emerging artists.

GoPro

GoPro optimized the experience that their consumers are already partaking in — taking amazing pictures and videos — and created the GoPro Awards, handing up to $5 million for the best photos and videos shot with its camera. The smart part of this idea is that GoPro isn’t looking at this just as another way to build customer loyalty; they see it as an opportunity to invest in the talented people who are using their products — and they want to invest in those people.

Don’t “Always Be Closing”

“Glengarry Glen Ross,” David Mamet’s two-act play that was first staged in 1983 and then brought to life as a Hollywood movie in 1992, featured one of the most memorable sales and marketing catchphrases of the past 25 years. In the movie, Alec Baldwin plays a character who doesn’t exist in the original play and only appears in one scene yet sets the tone for the entire movie with the mantra of any sales team: “A.B.C., Always Be Closing.”

Lifestyle brands implement a strategy that is the complete opposite of “A.B.C.” Their marketing doesn’t explicitly imply the selling of their product; rather, it’s about figuring out creative ways that their brand can enhance their consumers’ way of life. It’s about finding the “lifestyle secret sauce” that connects their brand with their consumers’ daily lives. If you can look at your brand through the same lens, then you can discover how to best resonate with your target market and “Always Be Closing” on your consumer leads.

POST WRITTEN BY: Alex Frias

Alex Frias is Co-Founder and President of Track Marketing Group, a brand agency that blends event experiences and social conversations.