Lifestyle Advertising

A lifestyle is a mode of behavior based on a set of interests, activities, ideas, attitudes, opinions and other characteristics that set a particular group of people or culture apart from other groups and cultures.

A lifestyle defines who people are, how they see themselves, or who they aspire to be and gives a sense of meaning and purpose to their lives.

When applied to marketing, lifestyle marketing becomes a marketing approach that where a brand ties itself to and embodies the aspirations, ideals, values, and aesthetics that their target market identifies with.

By doing so, lifestyle brands create the idea that using their products or being associated with their brand takes people closer to the kind of lifestyle they want to live.

Advertising in a Customer-centric World, introduces the idea of Lifestyle Advertising as advertising that allows marketers to respond to consumer feedback in an ongoing and interactive way via continuous dialogue, e.g., online discussion boards, chat rooms, blogs, user-review forums and social networks.

According to the report, when implemented, it should help influence conversations around your brand, drive consumer purchasing behavior and monetize ongoing customer relationships.

According to PricewaterhouseCoopers, the three principles of Lifestyle Advertising are:

1. Be relevant. Marketers have to understand the issues that are important to customers’ lives and build strategies around them.
2. Engage them. Converged media redefines engagement as it combines both brand-level and product-level interactions in the same consumer experience.
3. Build trust. To successfully engender trust with the consumer, efforts must be genuine and transparent, and companies must act on what they hear when listening to consumers.

But be warned: If you’re considering the Lifestyle Advertising path, you’ll need to implement new media strategies and significant organizational changes. Specifically:

Listen to the Market. You will need to view your audience not as a collection of consumers or a portfolio of demographic profiles but rather as individual customers.

Change and Respond. To maximize and monetize Lifestyle Advertising potential, you’ll have to be more open, have real-time flexibility and enable informed risk-taking. You must organize around the ongoing conversations in which you participate.

Consumer audiences now have the ability to talk directly to you as well as about you. If you engage them in a worldwide forum, consumers can very publicly impact brands, products and services. They can skip, ignore or avoid whatever they don’t want to view or engage. This new consumer empowerment can dramatically affect the programming and media distribution channels that rely on advertising support.