Lifestyle Brands and Brand Loyalty: Brands that Save Lives

A common question asked by our clients is "how do I get my customers to feel a greater sense of attachment or loyalty to our brand?"  The truth is, there is no surefire way that works for every audience and every brand, but for some brands, the proper positioning can really get things moving.

Recently my friend's father was in a car accident.  Thankfully he is okay, but the car, a Mustang, was totaled.  It just so happens that my friend himself had also been in an accident in the same vehicle years before and walked out fine as well.  When I spoke to him about it he said that he would only buy Mustangs for the rest of his life.  That car had saved their lives twice and he trusted the brand above any other.  He kept the hood ornament off the vehicle as a memento and a display of the brand he will forever be loyal to.  This mirrors a recent commercial by Subaru, which features a man retrieving the shifter knob from his totaled vehicle that saved his life as well.  This scenario is a powerful example of how a brand can earn loyalty with its audience and although the bond in this story occurred naturally, without the brand's involvement, if we dissect what happened we can actually build a formula for increasing brand loyalty.

Formula: Lifestyle Branding

First, cars are one of the most well known types of lifestyle brands.  Outside of price and fuel efficiency, the reason we pick a certain brand of vehicle usually pertains to its representation of the buyer's lifestyle or personality.  A parent of three buys a large van or SUV because it sells safety and allows the buyer to transport the whole family.  The successful entrepreneur buys a luxury vehicle to display his wealth and status.  The young kid or middle aged man buys the muscle car to represent masculinity and power.  Car brands identify these lifestyles and decision choices and market products around them.  Volvo has consistently marketed itself as the brand for safety.  Outside the auto industry, Apple is well known for its lifestyle marketing strategy.  Apple represents creativity and self-expression and owns a diehard fanbase of loyal users who self-identify with the brand.

Formula: Lifestyle Branding + Emotional Marketing

Second, the increase in loyalty occurred as a result of an emotional experience.  Emotional marketing is no secret.  Brands have been using it for decades.  The "Kodak Moments" campaign epitomizes emotional marketing.  Kodak knows that families cherish their memories and played off that emotion to entice buyers to trust their products if they want their memories to last a lifetime.  The semi-secret is that the emotion doesn't always have to be sad.  When Kodak partnered with Disney, Kodak Moments focused on fun and excitement while still appealing to love, togetherness and family.  MasterCard's "Priceless" campaign is another great example.  In the beginning, the ads focused on heartfelt emotions to instill the idea of priceless moments. As time progressed, however, MasterCard began to make the commercials comical, still triggering an emotional response, but in a humorous way.  Emotional marketing is one of the easiest and most effective ways to aid audience understanding of why your brand improves customers' lives.

Formula: Lifestyle Branding + Emotional Marketing + Delivering on Experience

If these two factors alone were enough to trigger brand loyalty, marketers would be a whole lot richer and brands wouldn't be struggling through price wars.  The final piece, and real key that makes your brand more than just a commodity, is truly delivering on the the needs of the lifestyle and the emotional experience your brand promises consumers.  Know your target audience.  If your product doesn't meet the needs of the lifestyle you are marketing to, your brand will be quickly dismissed because you don't truly understand the customer and industry.  Similarly, choose an emotion that is relevant to your product.  Making an emotional plea that doesn't align with your product will backfire.  Using your product must deliver on the emotional experience being advertised.  Say your brand sells winter wear.  If you choose to identify with an extreme sports lifestyle, ensure that your product enables freedom of movement, functionality, convenience and self-expression.  Furthermore, don't choose marketing that focuses on safety, but rather adventure or individuality.  By doing so, your audience will better identify with the brand and begin the path towards brand loyalty.

Formula: Lifestyle Branding + Emotional Marketing + Delivering on Experience = Brand Loyalty

So what's the answer I give our clients? Position your brand around your target audience's lifestyle choice, create authentic emotional marketing and deliver a brand experience that aligns with the brand's promise.

Check-in Revisited

Apple and Loopt are upping the ante on location-aware technology. Thanks to a new feature in iOS4, the application Loopt is able to consistently monitor users' locations in the background. This could have huge implications for the social use of location-aware applications.

Previously we noted that companies like Loopt have received minimal social uptake, partly due to security issues and having to rebuild your network on a new application. There is also a third reason though - the inability to check-out of a location. When a user checks-in to a location, their status remains at that location until they check-in somewhere else, meaning that if a friend decided to stop by and visit them, there was a good chance they could have already left...days ago even. Now, with background location, Loopt can continuously monitor your location (for a duration of time you control) and actually check you out of a location if it notices you are no longer within a given radius of the venue.

Clearly this doesn't address the primary two social concerns of location-aware applications, but this new feature does complete the technology, guaranteeing interactions between friends. Will this be enough to entice early adopters to reconsider social implications?

Girl Scouts Using Social Media - Modernizing a Brand

I grew up, as I'm sure most of us did, with the doorbell ringing and a little girl in uniform on the other side trying to sell me delicious overpriced cookies using her award winning smile.  Buying Girl Scout cookies is so ubiquitous that it almost equates to a rite of passage for new home owners - one of those inevitable events you know anticipate is going to happen that, unlike some first time experiences (like a pipe breaking), you can actually look forward to.  However, I haven't had a Girl Scout come to my door in years.  It certainly can't be because I'm not friendly :-D.  Is door-to-door selling just not bringing in the returns these future entrepreneurs are looking for?

According to an article from Mashable, more and more Girl Scouts are turning to social media in order to reach larger audiences and sell cookies faster - and with less work.  This may sound like a good idea at first, a smart way to use modern technology to increase sales, but the article warns that this may actually be tarnishing the Girl Scout brand.  For two years shy of a century, the Girl Scout brand has been aligned with cute girls coming directly to your door hawking baked goods.  That personal connection of knowing your neighborhood children and shelling out $5 a box to support her is what made the interaction so powerful.  You were more likely to buy from her in person because how could you say no to that innocent face price gouging you?  If this scenario took place entirely online, not in real time, through plain text, would you be as convinced to buy as you would be in person?  If done correctly, yes!

I'll admit that a status update from my neighbor saying "please buy girl scout cookies from my daughter," or, heaven forbid, actually setting up a Facebook store, would not entice me to purchase...unless she had some thin mints...mmm....err but um, no, that situation would not be so persuasive.  Imagine this instead, a personalized wall post with a picture of the daughter in uniform standing in an open front doorway, holding up an order form, with a caption attached saying "Ding Dong. Hi Mr. Cox, would you like to buy some Girl Scout cookies?" Um yeah, that's going to work.  Why? Because this scenario has modernized the classic Girl Scout interaction to play out in a digital realm.  On Facebook, my wall is the equivalent of my front door and a photo takes the place of looking through my peep hole.  In all effects, I feel as though I am still receiving the same level of personal service, but on a forum that I am more likely to respond to (I'm always available on Facebook, whereas it would be much harder to isolate a time when I'm regularly home).

This form of modernized service is the key to keeping historic brand interactions relevant today.  Feel out of touch with your local grocer or bakery? What if they posted their fresh produce or what's being pulled hot out of the oven? Not at home to receive that package? UPS could post a delivery notice to your Facebook wall, so that you could stop and retrieve the package on your way home rather than having to go back out.  Social media has upped the standards for customer service and it's no longer becoming a convenience, it's an expectation.  How is your brand adapting to better serve the customer?

Reviving Your Brand: Chatroulette

By now everyone should be familiar with Chatroulette, the internet site that allows users to video conference with random people from around the globe.  As the media and television shows like South Park have made very clear, the site is heavily used by individuals looking to perform sexual acts.  Despite the large market for a website serving this purpose, pornography had never been the original or desired intent of the site's creator.  This unwanted usage has lead to a surge of backlash from the media and a large portion of users disassociating with the site because they are tired of seeing naked images every time they try to hold a legitimate conversation.  For the last seven months, Chatroulette has done nothing to prevent or deter such behavior, most likely on the grounds of fostering free speech and expression; however, allowing the brand to grow organically and earn a negative reputation, especially in the US, has put the brand at risk of permanently becoming nothing more than another internet sex site.  Now, it appears founder Andrey Ternovskiy is taking a stand to intervene before it is too late.


According to an article on TechCrunch, Chatroulette is employing a series of new technologies that will use video recognition to weed out pornographic images and flag users who are repeatedly skipped.  Assuming the new technology works, will this effort be enough to save the decaying brand?  With the right set of actions, the answer should be yes.  Alone the technology improvements would not be able to re-energize the brand and reengage users who have already jumped ship, but with the right amount of crisis communication and a solid brand platform, Chatroulette can reinvent itself and ignite a growth in video communications and global networking.  


Similar to BP, but on a much less disastrous scale, Chatroulette needs to first initiate crisis communication to begin apologizing to its audience for the current state of the brand.  Following a current trend of using CEOs as spokesmen, Ternovsky needs to engage media representatives directly, stating that this was not the intended usage of the site, explaining why the situation was allowed to escalate to its current state, and thoroughly educating users on the technology being put into place to address the problem.  Second, Chatroulette needs to develop a new brand platform and positioning that sets the course for the brand's future.  If not pornography, what is the true intended purpose of the site? How can the service benefit its users? And what will the future hold if the brand revolutionizes the way we communicate and socialize.  The new positioning should give the audience a reason to care about the company and a promise of change to hold on to for the future.  Together, these two steps should display an effort to abandon the past and launch a new direction.


Of course, the last step is to carry through with what is promised.  Aside from the improvements to the underlying software, the biggest way to reflect the positive changes associated with the new brand platform is to improve the user experience on a visual level.  As the site looks now, Chatroulette is a very visually disengaging experience, resembling an early Windows 3.1 feel.  Although this may have accurately portrayed the brand as a startup (the vibe gives an old school feel, focusing on substance over quality and aligning with an initial audience that most likely isn't swayed by just a pretty visage), combined with the current perception of the brand, the visual scheme of the site actually portrays a very low tech and even distrusting persona. If Ternovsky cares enough about the brand's perception to change the technology, he should also care enough to create a visual scheme that appears modern and professional (Apple-esque I'm sure).


With all this in place, the brand should have the legs it needs to reposition itself in the market and reengage lost audience members.  After a trial period of testing the updated software and analyzing some initial feedback on the overall user experience, I would further suggest that Chatroulette begins to sponsor or partner with other aligning interests.  If the new positioning aims to bridge language barriers and span distances, sponsor a pen pal program for high school foreign language departments.  If the new positioning is focused on networking and meeting new people, partner with dating sates and social media networks.  Not only will this drastically increase the site's user base, it will further build trust in a brand that had once been greatly discredited.

Has Lincoln Become a Classic Brand Without Modern Relevance?

Recently I was asked by a large automotive marketing firm to conduct a brand analysis for Lincoln.  Below is my review of Lincoln’s current market crisis:
With nearly a century‘s worth of history, Lincoln has proudly maintained the concept of elite, sophisticated luxury that the brand was initially built on. For generations the Town Car has been known as the pinnacle of high status. Designed to fill just such a role as the personal transport for Henry Ford, the Town Car brand has long defined its category, similar to Kleenex or Band-Aid, being the name used to describe a chauffeured vehicle long after additional players entered the space. And for 70 years the Lincoln Continental was the vehicle of choice for the successful family man. There is no doubt that Lincoln has always understood what it means to be a status brand – a symbolic expression of the personality and lifestyle of its users. However, as a sea of rival luxury brands continued to enter the market, Lincoln released a product that would forever change the positioning of the brand, opening it up to an endless potential of future-forward possibilities.
1998 brought the launch of the Lincoln Navigator and, although they may not have realized it at the time, this vehicle would set a new precedent of bringing luxury and class to emerging markets. The Navigator allowed Lincoln to enter the highly sought after market of SUVs, but in a way that opened the trend up to its core demographic. From that moment forward, this is where the power of the Lincoln brand would lie, in bringing its history and industry-leading standards of luxury to new automotive trends and new audiences. A lack of internal understanding and external communication of this new positioning, however, would soon cost the brand relevancy in the market.
As it stands now, a decade later, Lincoln’s brand has lost focus. New model vehicles have continued to bring luxury to new markets, including eco-friendly with hybrid support, technology focused with Sync and SIRIUS Travel Link, and power seekers with superior performance and handling and ultraquiet environments; however, this has most likely been as a means of keeping up with lower priced competitors rather than as pioneering a field. Additionally, Lincoln’s true audience has dramatically shifted from its original target. The successful family man is now a thirty year old entrepreneur.
If Lincoln is to uphold its heritage and regain its superiority in the market, it needs to understand how to reach and communicate with its new audience and reposition itself in a way that gives the audience a reason to care about the brand. It needs to remember what made the Navigator such a success. It needs to become the brand that brings luxury to groundbreaking technology.

Why You Should Check-In to Location-Aware Apps

Location-aware applications have been a hot trend this past year after the leaders in "Check-In," Foursquare and Gowalla, took SXSW by storm last spring.  Surely these two companies were not the pioneers in the field (as this author had been using similar location-based social media app Loopt for several months prior), but their strong presence at the national event, backed by sleek interfaces and updated technology, brought the attention of location-aware apps to the forefront of social media.  The response from users and industry analysts alike has been mixed at best with a few early adopters (yours truly included) singing their praises while a larger majority either dismissed the tools or frowned upon them for various reasons including privacy or redundancy.  However, as new contenders continue to enter the space and marketers become a little more savvy, industry players are beginning to realize that there may be more use to these tools than they were previously given credit for.  Here we will analyze the social versus business value of these services and discuss how new players are changing the nature of the game in the right direction.


Early services in the location-aware field, such as Loopt and Britekite, and even more recent players like Google Latitude, Gowalla and Whrrl, have focused their services primarily around the social aspect of checking-in.  These services allow users to broadcast their location to their social circles by checking-in at a venue, often accompanied by a short comment or picture.  The goal is that nearby friends will see your location and choose to join you. In theory this sounds fun, but many concerns and short-comings quickly arose - chief amongst them safety.  But the real problem was that there were too many of these apps and none of them were offered by the major social players - Facebook and Twitter.  Users had to rebuild their networks all over again, convince friends to use the new services and, frankly, remember or continue to use the services.  An update to have these apps post your check-in directly to Facebook seemed like a possible solution, but it was nothing that posting to Facebook on your own or sending a text message couldn't already accomplish.

The real solution is that the services aren't being used for the correct purposes.  Don't try and fight the market leaders.  Facebook and Twitter already own our social networks.  Anything we want to communicate directly to our groups of friends, colleagues and acquaintances will be done through these well established channels.  Instead, focus on how checking-in to a location can benefit the user and the venue.  This is where Foursquare and subsequent derivatives are beginning to do things right.

Location-aware services need to be entirely focused on direct marketing - knowing exactly who your customer is, where they are, how often they go, and providing them with the rewards and incentives they have earned for their loyalty and advocacy.  Most people are aware of Foursquare's mayor status, but there are so many more reward tiers that Foursquare allows, such as loyalty programs, first time visitor promotions, and even one day only sales.  Take a look at what Cynthia Rowley (Mashable) is doing - a one time promotion, for two hours, where anyone who checks in gets a $25 gift card and 15% off.  Brilliant!  Veteran Loopt introduced an additional service called Loopt Star which has a similar, but more refined, effect.  Check in twice at Gap with Loopt Star and save 25% (Forbes).  Not only does this provide a great incentive for users to visit and return to a restaurant or store, but it also costs nothing for the venue to market the promotion and it gets plastered all over Facebook and Twitter every time someone checks-in.  That is where the value lies.

An additional benefit for the venue lies in reviews and referrals.  Yelp is a prime example here as one of the largest online peer review sites.  Users check in to a location and proceed to write reviews, post photos and share their experiences.  In fact, most of the location-based apps allow for Twitter-esque 140 character shout-outs, which can be shared via Facebook.  Give the customer something positive to shout about and reward them for doing it and you have a perfect platform for free marketing that is golden for large corporations and small businesses alike.

Of course, problems still exist, largely in  that these types of promotional uses are still few and far between.  Getting $1 off  your coffee after battling to be the Foursquare mayor at your local Starbucks hardly seems like a strong enough reason for users to maintain another social media tool.  There's also the fact that there are a lot of new apps being developed that are quickly flooding this space and its far too soon to pick a winner.  Big names like Foursquare or Gowalla may have the recognition and high number of daily check-ins (Foursquare is estimating 1 million check-ins per day [Twitter]), but new services like Loopt Star and WeReward are rewriting the rules, creating apps that blatantly depict the value of checking-in. Finally, there is the problem of corporate buy-in.  Most businesses, large or small, are still trying to figure out what it means to operate in the social media realm, maintaining a relationship with their fans, providing industry news and insights, and engaging the consumer directly on Facebook and Twitter with storefronts, promotions and contests.  If most brands still don't see the complete value of social media, how can we expect them to by into another fledgling tech trend?

The solution is to directly engage the businesses that have the most to gain from localized, low cost advertising - small businesses and restaurants.  Although every business is trying to increase sales right now, small businesses especially are suffering and can benefit greatly from this service in many ways.  First is awareness.  After establishing a partnership with Foursquare, the app informs users every time they are near a venue with a special offer.  This will immediately help raise awareness of unknown venues and encourage first time visits.  Second is rewarding loyalty.  Everyone is familiar with loyalty cards that reward a visitor for their 10th purchase.  Location-aware apps offer the same tool, but without the need for printed cards, special hole punchers and with the bonus of a network-wide shout out every time a hole is punched/check-in occurs.  Finally, it helps to venue reach out to a new audience on their terms.  Today's younger audiences aren't being exposed to direct mail, ads in the paper or even commercials on the radio.  They're taking suggestions from friends and social media.  By connecting with this audience on their terms, not only are small businesses able to tap new audiences, but the audience in question's immediate perception of the business will be tech savvy and modern, which they can relate to.

As social media marketers it is our job to promote these services to our clients and continue to help them grow.  The more business partner with location-aware websites, the more users will join, and so on, forming a reciprocal cycle. (*Shameless Plug*) As my clients can attest, the benefit is there and the value is measurable, the hard part is just taking the first step and learning more.