Customer-driven media
How to use customer personas to design your media plan
Consumers want entertainment. This trend is pushing brand executives to dust off their content studios, acquire movie-making chops, maniacally collaborate, and start putting showbiz talent teams together.
But the exact entertainment strategies are still work in progress.
Entertainment means not only traditional long-form TV and movie content and amusement parks, but also short-form social content, snippets of dance routines and cultural commentary, paparazzi shots, events, capsule launches, and merch and retail experiences. Pharrell understands this entertainment portfolio well. At LV, there’s always something happening in between runway shows — which themselves are spectacles — either a new store opening (the LA one gathered an impressive crowd of celebrity guests) or a capsule, like the recently released one with Tyler, The Creator, or a celebration event for a capsule. The outcome is a lot of cultural interest, owned and shared content, and the global attention management that no other brand can emulate.
Entertainment is, in this moment, an approach and an attitude, rather than a specific set of tactics. It focuses not just on the big event/launch/release/show itself, but on the time in-between. In fashion is still relatively rare to have always-on media outside of the seasonal fashion calendar, and media plans revolve around big buys mixed with performance marketing.
The shift is a matter of survival. Media is going through the great repricing, where market corrects the costs of traditional advertising, like print and TV, as well as of paid digital media. From consumers’ point of view, media is valuable if and when they respond to their social needs, identity markers like status signaling and belonging, motivations, tastes, and interests. But since there are 912 million ad-blocking users worldwide in Q2 2023, advertising’s current role in consumers’ lives (other than annoyance) are minimal.
Read the rest of this analysis on The Sociology of Business.
