What are the opportunities in your customer’s life?
In essence, the ambition of a lifestyle brand should be to educate customers or in other words, to help them learn. Only once you have understood what is meaningful in a customer’s life, through how they experience world, will you then be able to unlock new value in business.
Ambitions of a Lifestyle Brand
Every ambitious brand should aim to have a meaningful role in a customer’s life. However, it isn’t a simple exercise to qualify as a lifestyle brand. To become a lifestyle brand takes time — nurturing a community of customers, achieving clarity on the direction of products and services, and carefully controlling a brand’s public image. Success will be determined by a brand’s ability to continually create aspirational value in the lives of customers.
In essence, the ambition of a lifestyle brand should be to educate customers or in other words, to help them learn. The brands who are able to make effective conversations with customers about their aspirational lifestyle are on the right track for success. This is because customers can learn through those conversations how they can bridge the perceived gaps in their life with branded products and services. Further more, technology is allowing brands to have a more direct conversation whilst customers are at work, home or on-the-go.
When a brand has become a go-to choice over its competition it has established a meaningful role in a customers life. And as a result, the way customers make decisions becomes much more about sustaining a relationship with their aspirational self (E.G. A healthier version of myself), as much as it is about the obvious functional utility of products and services.
Examples today
Traditionally, lifestyle brands were rooted in fashion and those brands educated their customers through a Ralph Lauren style of printed advertisements. Today, lifestyle brands can be found more broadly across industries and customer channels such as the following examples.
Apple store experience
Apple stores are primarily intended for customers to learn about products and services through free workshops, personal setups and technical support.
Jamie Oliver campaign
The ‘Sugar Rush’ campaign across social media and television aims to lobby sugary products, alongside positioning a Jamie Oliver brand of healthier products.
Innocent packaging
Innocent package their food and drink products with clear communication about it’s ingredients, such as the number of fruits used in a smoothie.
Defining ‘lifestyle’
Pearlfisher, the well versed branding agency, describe the route to becoming a lifestyle brand as understanding what the definition of lifestyle means to you and your audience. However, this is easier said than done.
How do you understand a customer’s lifestyle and then translate it into a clear direction for a brand’s products and services?
For most of you reading this, you won’t have a budget like Apple, Jamie Oliver or Innocent. So to help, I’m going to share an overview of our approach. Below I’ve highlighted the key steps to consider before developing new products and services for your brand.
About the work
Natasha Marshall are an interior textiles company who produce textile patterns for wall coverings, fabric upholstery and curtains. Following the launch of their web-shop to sell their own branded products, we worked to understand the customer experience of buying interior textiles. We then identified the opportunities to grow their relationship with customers and increase direct business online. You see the full case study here.
Discover — reframe perspectives
First and foremost, start by reframing the question from the business’s perspective to the customer’s perspective (which also works for business-to-business).
For the Natasha Marshall brand we reframed — how do we increase fabric and wall-covering sales? to — how do customers improve their interiors? Our approach to the research was an ethnography of a customer’s life. We discovered the customer’s struggles, aspirations and compensating behaviours they go through when improving their interiors. As a result, we gained a broader and deeper understanding of the business Natasha Marshall are actually in, from the customer’s perspective.
Design — ideas that connect worlds
Before getting excited about shiny interfaces and packaging, establish the key insights that connect the business with customer’s world. Use these insights to drive the design of products and services.
For the Natasha Marshall brand, we designed and developed an online recommendation service that gives customers personal advice on their home furnishings. Due to having no physical retail space, the Natasha Marshall team need to engage customers remotely from their studio based in Glasgow. Therefore the service uses technology to connect the Natasha Marshall team to the customer’s interior, and give aspirational design advice.
Deliver — conversations with customers
Meaningful value is created when customer’s understand how the brand fits into their life. This is achieved through effective conversations with branded products and services; the store, the packaging, the advertisement, etc.
For the Natasha Marshall brand, the Ask the Studio service is a convenient way for customers to get personalised recommendations on fabric and wall-covering style, its use and quantity, all the comfort of their own home. At it’s heart the service is designed to have conversations with customers. These conversations help customers learn how to use the Natasha Marshall branded fabrics and wall-coverings in their interiors.
Feeling ambitious
For those ambitious businesses who are asking themselves: How can we become a lifestyle brand? You should instead be asking: What are the opportunities in our customers’ lives? Only once you have understood what is meaningful in a customer’s life, through how they experience world, will you then be able to unlock new value in business.
