Selling Life

                                                                                         

Its easy to get wrapped up in the sort of short sighted thinking that dictates marketing focus solely on selling products. That, of course, is what you’re shooting for in the short term. A broader based view of marketing will tell you that it is equally about selling an image and a lifestyle. Just look at MTV. Have you noticed a real lack of the music that the “M” in MTV used to stand for? There’s a reason all of those video’s have been replaced by programming centered around lifestyles. That sort of programming holds viewer attention long enough to get them to sit through multiple commercial breaks, which in turn means more advertising dollars for the station.

That’s just one example of how selling an image can engage customers and strengthen product sales more than straightforward product hawking can. With that in mind, let’s take a look at how lifestyle marketing can augment business brochures.

Know Your Customers: This requires a little insight but its important to laying the groundwork for your brochure design. Look at the demographic of your current customers and try to find a commonality in them. If you’re selling exercise equipment, you’ll find a mix of personal vanity (don’t take it personal, I’m in the gym six days a week, myself) and concerns about health (or trying to fight off its waning). At its most basic, you’re talking about fear, ego and sex. You’re brochure’s should highlight these concerns through the use of images of attractive, hyper-fit people or startling before/after transformations, and through your text with catch phrases like “Achieve the look you’ve always desired” or “Build that sleek sexy body and get noticed.”

Know the Times: Just taking a look at the latest headlines can point out ways you can further utilize lifestyle marketing to reinforce your ad. Look at what’s on people’s minds and what people are saying and adjust your ads to suite the zeitgeist of the times. Most recently, people are concerned about the slowing economy, the price of commodities like gas and fears of a global food shortage. Dire times, indeed, but they don’t have to be dire times for your business if you can appeal to those fears in your brochure printing. Are you selling army surplus goods? Promote you’re MRE (meals ready to eat) as emergency food stores to the survivalist set. Images of rugged outdoorsmen or families warm and secure by the campfire eating your MRE’s can appeal to the ego or need for security and safety. Headlines like “Don’t be caught unprepared” or “With MRE’s there’s no need to worry about breadlines and food shortages.”

The key is narrowing down the lifestyle you are trying to reach to a small handful of hopes and fears and then playing on them in your next batch of full color brochures. Few products are going to sell themselves and the straight forward approach to marketing can be as futile as trying to find a music video on MTV. Instead, think about the lives of the people you are trying to sell to and appeal to the instinctual drives that define them.Its easy to get wrapped up in the sort of short sighted thinking that dictates marketing focus solely on selling products. That, of course, is what you’re shooting for in the short term. A broader based view of marketing will tell you that it is equally about selling an image and a lifestyle.

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