Insight into Lifestyle Brand Building from our Biti Emporium Project

The notion of a Lifestyle Brand is often conflated with brands owned by lifestyle businesses, and while that is definitely one way to understand the word, a lifestyle brand in today’s day and age is not just the preserve of lifestyle businesses, but the new standard of brand building in the contemporary era that all brands must aspire to survive, thrive, and grow.

But before we get ahead of ourselves, what is a lifestyle brand?

A Lifestyle brand is a brand that effectively embodies the aspirations, ideals, and interests of its target audience. It is the successful linkage of a product or service through strategic emotive connections to a particular way of life, culture or sub-culture in a manner desirable and relatable to its target audience.

Going by this definition, any brand capable of transforming its products and services into a culture or lifestyle marker/validator is in essence a lifestyle brand.

However, we understand that it is one thing to understand the what, but an entirely different thing to understand how to get started building or transitioning into a lifestyle brand.

To help make it easier for you to know how and where to focus, we’re going to be using Biti Emporium; a brand we helped bring to life for our client in 2022 as a case study on how to create or recreate a lifestyle brand.

1. Make it about Your Customer’s Aspirations

Too often, many brands stay stuck on their big vision and what they hope to accomplish when what they ought to be focusing on to successfully capture the imagination of their target audience are their TA’s own aspirations.

For Biti Emporium, the brand’s vision was to encourage style-consciousness and a more dynamic approach to fitness through its unique, eccentric, and expansive fitness range. However, when it came to defining the mission statement for the brand, we did not focus on apparel, but rather on the lifestyle that drives the uptake of stylish and tech-savvy fitness wear and practices — a fitness-conscious culture.

The brand’s mission as communicated by us is to drive fitness discipline and wellness consciousness and why. Because only those who are disciples of fitness, and wellness enthusiasts care enough about the quality and style of fitness apparel and are willing to explore new ways and methods to live a more wholesome life.

Understanding this is to understand that the job of a successful lifestyle brand is to either inspire, enable, or improve cultures, and lifestyle experiences among their customers, both beyond and through their products or services.

2. Create the Right Brand Personality

When it comes to Millennials and Gen Z Consumers authenticity and relatability is 90% of the Job. This generation of consumers like none other before them, have high expectations of brands. What’s more, is that they expect brands who want their money to actually live up to those expectations.

So, where authenticity is concerned, the fake it till you make it approach to brand positioning and brand building won’t cut it. Brands must now re-evaluate their ethos and values (two key aspects reflected in a brand personality) to ensure it adequately embody the values, ethics, and interests of their target audience.

This is very crucial, as consumers want to see a brand that doesn’t just sell the right product or service, but a brand that lives the lifestyles and values attached to it. Only then can a brand become a lifestyle brand, and achieve buy-in with these new consumers.

3. Be Exclusive in Your Communication

Truly great communication is rarely (if ever) “all-inclusive”. It is targeted at a specific portion of the overall population bonded by anything from shared values, and culture, to age groupings and interests. This is a Phenomenon that drivers of every great lifestyle brand out there understand, and use.

The drivers of Apple specifically tell you that their brand isn’t for just anyone. They consistently remind you that Apple is for people who “think different”. Outliers in their own rights, and just like that all communications around the brand either speak to people who are different, and fancy themselves outliers or those who desire to be.

So with Biti Emporium, we knew that what our client was trying to accomplish, wouldn’t appeal to everyone. It would only appeal to the top 10% of fitness and wellness enthusiasts, and so our communications stayed true to that.

I. We defined our audience accordingly; Upwardly mobile, and cosmopolitan 25 – 45 year olds who love technology and consider fitness and wellness to be a huge part of living a wholesome life.

II. Next, we designed the brand language to speak specifically to people who are in this demographic and desire to be.

Biti Emporium isn’t a fitness apparel company, it is a club of upwardly mobile, cosmopolitan, tech-savvy fitness, and wellness junkies.

So the answer to the question of who you are when you are a lifestyle brand isn’t in what your brand does, but rather in who it helps your customers and target audience become.

In Conclusion, In 2023, while you may own the brand, the brand isn’t in fact about you. Every successful brand today from; Nike and Apple to Netflix, and Mercedes goes beyond the product or service, and straight to what motivates and drives their customers; Identity and aspirations.

With a new generation of consumers on the market who value experiences, culture, and identity far above traditionally lauded product or service winning points, brands who hope to grow and dominate must not only adapt their communications but overhaul their brand strategy to align with the interests and values of the new economic drivers.

Published By: Phenom Communications

One thing we love and do is educate brand owners and minders on the intricacies of successful branding, and today, our attention is fixed squarely on lifestyle brand building. Not only do we believe that every B2C brand should in 2023 evolve into a lifestyle brand, this article breaks down 3 key things to understand and focus on when building a lifestyle brand.

#branding #lifestylebrand #brandmessaging #millennials #genzmarketing