Integrating Lifestyle into Marketing Strategies

Cultivate your consumers and make your marketing efforts soar by incorporating lifestyle into your marketing mix  

A well-proportioned content strategy can determine how effective your marketing has the potential to be. Finding the balance between traditional and lifestyle content is important when looking for your marketing sweet spot and cultivating your consumers. In traditional marketing we are often shown a call to action - buy this product, visit this website etc but with the incorporation of lifestyle you are able to engage consumers with information that adds value without a direct link to buy. Using customer relationship marketing a brand is able to build emotional attachment with consumers of a product, the goal being to sell the lifestyle that goes along with the product. When you take a new approach to the way you deliver  messages to consumers they are more likely to pay attention to it and engage further aka head towards the call to action. By building an emotional attachment and creating a lifestyle for a product you will be able to establish the devotion needed to create a valuable customer base.

Understanding your consumers way of life

Brands who successfully use lifestyle content as a strategy all have one thing in common, they have a deep understanding of their consumer’s way of life. In order to understand how to reach your consumers it is important to know what they crave, as well as the people and things that inspire and motivate them. It’s looking at your consumers as a culture. If you want your lifestyle marketing to work you need to know also how your company’s brand aligns with consumers values and be an extension of those values. Once you fully understand your consumer than you can bring your brand - or product - into that culture so your brand and products become key contributors in your consumers way of life. When you reach your consumer than they will be excited to use your products and show off your brand as a way of demonstrating who they are and how they want to be seen. This is why incorporating lifestyle is so important, it creates a lasting impression with the consumer and without them realizing encourages them to promote it.

Using lifestyle to enhance a brands marketing or (creating content about your customers not your product)

As an experiential company, we have the opportunity to bring life to the brands that we work with by incorporating lifestyle into their marketing efforts. It creates a unique experience for not only the brand but also to the consumer when they see the end product. Recently when working with our client Volkswagen we had the opportunity to develop lifestyle stories for each of their new 2019 models. A typical car commercial would show the car as a whole and talk about the features in order to get the sale, cut and dry and to the point. This is where we get to be creative and use lifestyle to engage the consumer past the generic and obvious selling points. Our approach was to create individualized stories for each model to show how the car can be used in real time and in real situations. This shows how the car can be enhancing to the consumers life and reaches them on a deeper level as the stories can be relatable and dive into the culture of the world around them. By understanding the type of consumer that each car is targeted to we were able to create lifestyle stories based on their specific interests and their specific “culture.” This creates deeper value for the consumer looking to buy a car and builds a lifestyle for the product which leads to emotional attachment and future devotion. Adding content that is about the customer instead of the brand is always going to make your marketing efforts that much more successful. How could placing a product in front of a consumer and leaving it at that be memorable?

Incorporating lifestyle into your marketing strategies can be one of the best ways to develop a devoted customer base and get your brand noticed. When the consumer feels that your brand aligns with their lifestyle they are proud to support it and even show it off - causing the cycle to begin - their friends notice and share too etc. As a marketer it is important to understand your audience first in order to properly align your brand with their culture and once done properly the magic can begin.

Have you tried lifestyle marketing for your brand or the brands your work with? Leave us a note in the comments.