Connecting your brand to your consumer's lifestyle

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. And who does a fantastic job of this? Lifestyle brands!

Reference books say a lifestyle brand is a company that markets its products or services to embody the interests, attitudes, and opinions of a group or a culture. Lifestyle brands seek to inspire, guide, and motivate people, with the goal of their products contributing to the definition of the consumer's way of life.

By definition therefore, 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 (apologies to Brands specialist, Akin Adeoya) 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 is one exemplary lifestyle brand 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.

The 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.

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

Additional reports by ‘Dele Dele-Olukoju Marketing Communication Digest. He writes from Lagos, Nigeria.