The New Lifestyle Marketing.
The last post got me thinking about how marketing to the Early Majority has undergone quite dramatic changes in the last few years. The classic approach for moving products and categories from Early Adopters to Early Majority was to stop focusing on innovative technology and features and start focusing on lifestyle and design.
The brands that popularised categories were those who helped people understand how those products or services could fit into their lives. This insight helped to bring the idea of “Lifestyle Marketing” to the fore in the late 80s and early 90s. For me one of the classic icons of this kind of marketing were the Hilfiger ads like this one below via: http://www.flickr.com/photos/vancegap/
These featured the sole requisite black guy who hangs with an otherwise all-white preppy crowd. The idea, of course, was that these brands were telling you what kinds of lifestyles they were suitable for, and by extension, what kind of lifestyle you could attain by buying into this brand. As the 90s progressed, ads and brands built upon vapour like this rightfully stumbled and lifestyle marketing went into hiding for just about everyone except Grey Goose.
However, Lifestyle Marketing didn’t disappear. Instead, I think it has re-emerged in a much more meaningful and valuable way. As I said previously, Google’s new Latitude doesn’t necessarily break new ground on innovation but it does break new ground on ease-of-use and, most importantly, ease of integration into your lifestyle.
It’s built into Google Maps which you probably already use, it integrates with SMS, Google Talk and Gmail. It’s available on almost any phone or smartphone, on your PC or through iGoogle. You have full control over how much you want to broadcast, and it’s also available in 27 countries and 42 languages.
To me this is a brilliant example of New Lifestyle Marketing. Where Old Lifestyle Marketing asked you to change your lifestyle to accomodate the brand, New Lifestyle Marketing is about the brand changing its products and services to fit your life.
While this is very clear in the technology area, there are also numerous examples in other categories. Sarah found this one for a recent project.
Happy Baby makes frozen organic baby meals, but instead of marketing it around a organic lifestyle, they’re simply enabling busy people to bring organic food into their lives. This is absolutely about marketing that’s helping to bring an innovation to the mainstream. It’s also marketing that clearly helps to establish how this fits into your life and what kind of lifestyle this is for. But instead of simply claiming it, they’re actually enabling it.
