When you’re offering a product or a service, your marketing shouldn’t just be about the thing you’re selling. It’s about you, and it’s about what you can do for your customers—particularly how you can make them feel. But for some brands, it goes even a step further. It almost stops being about the product at all and is just about developing that feeling or being a part of that community.
These are lifestyle brands. They’re the brands that you follow on Instagram even if you don’t own anything they sell. Let’s look at a few lifestyle brand examples, and how they pulled off the move from product to center of attention.
What is a Lifestyle Brand?
The academic-sounding way to put it is to say that a lifestyle brand is one that markets itself and anything it’s really selling (their product or service) to embody the interests and attitudes of a group or subculture.
In other words, the interests of this group are central to the company’s brand identity. Rather than saying what they’re offering is the best gadget on the market, a lifestyle brand tells a story and offers the life of the person who’s part of the tribe. So customers aren’t necessarily buying because the product is superior to the competition, but because it makes them a part of the community.
It’s a nice place to be—you’re not trying to convince people to buy from you, you actually have people racing to come to you. You’re not doing all the heavy lifting, advertising to try to get attention—you have dedicated advocates spreading the word on your behalf for free. How can you get there? Let’s look at some of today’s best lifestyle brands to find out.
LaCroix: The Pop That Isn’t
If you’re like me, LaCroix is known as that mostly flavorless fizzy water that doesn’t know how to pronounce its own name properly. But if you’re, well, almost anyone else in America (including most of our team here at Element Three), it’s essentially a lifestyle. It’s gone from the forgotten cousin of the supermarket’s soda section to, as Vox put it, “not just creating loyalty but becoming part of how we define ourselves.”
How did they do it? Partially it’s because health-conscious Americans are kicking their soda habits, and the low-calorie sugar-free LaCroix is a good replacement. It has everything soda has (portability, reasonable serving size, lots of little bubbles) without the bad parts.
But it’s not just luck. LaCroix saw the soda trends and jumped, using their already robust production infrastructure and savvy social media marketing (not to mention some buzz marketing from bloggers and journalists who already loved the stuff) to increase their sales and boost stock prices from $12 a share in 2010 to $55 in 2016 and nearly $60 a share as I write this.
Their biggest coup was probably getting approved as part of the Whole30 diet program, which encourages dieters to share meals on social media—meaning lots of photos with pastel LaCroix cans across the healthy eating community.
The buzz continues to build. Just search #lacroix on Instagram to see how excited people get to talk about the drink online, and you’re also likely to see sloganeering shirts (“LACROIX OVER BOYS” is probably my favorite one) and memes and anything else a carbonated-water-infused mind can dream up. It’s not a soda, it’s not really water—but it is definitely a meme, and a great example of lifestyle branding.
Red Bull: Truly Giving People Wings
If you’re struggling to get through a workday afternoon or a long-distance drive, you’ve probably tried an energy drink or a dozen. They’ve been around almost as long as the soda industry has existed, but the popularization of Red Bull at the turn of the century really helped the concept take off in the United States. Now it’s an industry worth billions of dollars, and Red Bull is at the forefront.
You’ve likely seen their commercials, with the slow animation and memorable catchphrase (that is, “Red Bull gives you wings!”). But Red Bull has also made headway on positioning themselves as a lifestyle brand, and while they’re a carbonated soda-esque beverage like LaCroix, they’ve gone in a completely different direction in terms of the lifestyle they promote.
While LaCroix is going after the trendy (or some might say “basic”) set, Red Bull is chasing adrenaline addicts. The tagline itself is part of that—it evokes the idea that the drink will give you the energy to literally fly, if you need to. But they’ve also done it through carefully chosen sports and event promotions that develop the extreme feel.
In terms of your more standard or traditional sports, Red Bull has a strong presence. American sports fans likely know their MLS team, New York Red Bulls, the former home of all-time great Thierry Henry. In soccer they are also involved with RB Leipzig of the German Bundesliga, FC Red Bull Salzburg in Austria, and others. Red Bull Racing was Formula One’s World Constructors’ Champion in 2010, 2011, 2012, and 2013, and housed World Champion driver Sebastian Vettel in all four seasons as well.
But they didn’t stop there. They also sponsor and fund a wide range of more extreme events, like the Red Bull Air Race, motocross, and rally cars, as well as some truly out-there stunts. The Red Bull Flugtag, for example, is an annual event in which competitors home-build imaginative flying machines, which are then tested and judged for how successful—and how absurd—they are.
And perhaps most famously, they sponsored skydiver Felix Baumgartner’s successful 2012 attempt to set a new record for highest altitude jump, highest manned balloon flight, and to become the first human to break the sound barrier unpowered.
For some (your humble author included), Red Bull today is more associated with soccer and people jumping off of really tall things than they are with caffeine. Other competitors have tried to match them, but Red Bull’s dominant sales performance says all you need to know.
