Doesn’t it seem reasonable to market products to people like ourselves? If you’re a health nut marketing nutritional supplements, you look for others with that bent, i.e. those who know nutrition matters.
That way you’re at least a credible member of the same community, rather than an outsider marketing “to” someone you barely know and know even less about. Plus you don’t have to do therapy.
However, the Harvard Business Review has another angle: Should we think about “targeting those (prospective) customers’…alter egos, as well?”
“Advertising,” writes Paul Hemp, “has always targeted a powerful consumer alter ego: that hip, attractive, incredibly popular person just waiting to emerge (with the help of the advertised product) from an all-too-normal self.” Harvard Business Review, 6.06, p. 52. (Here’s the PDF of this intriguing piece.)
He suggests, among other things, visiting and participating in the hugely popular online virtual game world, Second Life, just to get a taste of how hundreds of thousands of people live out totally other identities – identities that might be much more interested in your product than you’d ever have guessed based on what you see of them under the usual circumstances.
Playing to who they dream they are. With your product to help them attain the new self. Imagine that.
Start with you. Who would you be if you could be anyone? What kind of a second life would you live?
As THAT person, what kinds of things would you buy and enjoy with others?
Hmm.
>…that hip, attractive, incredibly popular person just waiting to emerge (with the help of the advertised product) from an all-too-normal self.
So then, we’re talking ‘aspirational marketing’ – the basic concept of which is enabling consumers to attain the trappings of a lifestyle beyond their current standing… a greater sense of sophistication (for which they’ll often part with much extra money).
I have never been a fan of the “fake it till you make it” mantra, if that’s what you are referring to.
This is really more about the different identies people might have – as we see by the hundreds of thousands who assume other identities on the Internet, both young and old…
Their secret passions, for example, that only come out when the usual people aren’t around…Fun to think about appealing to some of those with your product.
For example, I have been a closet movie maker for years and bought a first rate DVD camera, which I keep beside one of my desks, to remind me to get to using it after my usual work is done…
🙂
My avatar doesn’t have dry, cracked feet.
— Walter from Appleton, WI
>I have never been a fan of the “fake it till you make it” mantra, if that’s what you are referring to.
Moi? Fake it? Considering how hard I bang that ‘authenticity’ drum, not at all. Perish the thought. Abso-lutely d*mn not. 😉
Without wishing to incure the smiley wrath or happy chidings of the positive thinker brigade… for most folk Life don’t read like a Nightingale Conant success tale. Instead, it’s more akin to ‘hanging on in quiet desperation… thought I’d something more to say’ – and a kickstart is required to initiate the ‘tired of waitin’ for tomorrow to come, or that train to come roarin’ round the bend’ breakfree into ‘these are better days’ territory.
And, often that ‘escape’ is no more complex than buying new & different stuff. There’s no ‘faking it’ – we simply step out of the crap in which we’ve been standing and be what we’ve been trying to become. (Or, if we believe the NC spin, at least that’s how it should be.)
>Their secret passions, for example, that only come out when the usual people aren’t around…
Encouraging the ‘secret’ to become ‘public’, is a primary function of responsible marketers (ha!). At least it is in my ‘pompous ass’ book. We’re too often ‘taught’ to repress passion as a character flaw – rather than celebrate it. If we ‘live it in secret’, then we’re fakers.