What is a Lifestyle Brand and How Do You Start One?

Home » Tips, Insights and Trends » What is a Lifestyle Brand and How Do You Start One?

What is a Lifestyle Brand and How Do You Start One?

Categories: Branding, Professional Services

In today’s interconnected marketing world, customer expectations go beyond the pursuit of a product – they want to buy an entire experience. Lifestyle brands are particularly effective at this approach, using their deep understanding of their audience to build a long-lasting relationship with them. But where do you begin with starting a lifestyle brand? What makes their marketing powerful, and how do you replicate their success? Whether you are establishing a new one or refreshing your existing brand, the key is to entice consumers into buying an aspiration, not just a good or service.

So, What is a Lifestyle Brand?

Lifestyle brands help consumers to imagine the ideal versions of themselves, then offer their brand as the means to achieve it. They allow them a glimpse into a group they admire and then picture themselves in the middle of it. They capitalize on human emotion, aspirations, and principles. Instead of selling you shoes, great lifestyle brands are offering you the dream of being an athlete. They aren’t asking you to buy a car; they are coaxing you with adventure. Instead of advertising clothing, you are purchasing luxury and social status. Lifestyle brand management doesn’t sell an item; it sells a way of life.

Deconstructing a Lifestyle Brand: What Makes it Tick?

Launching a lifestyle brand requires a long-term strategy that focuses on connecting with your customers and building engagement with your whole brand, not just individual products or services. It creates brand loyalty and keeps your target audiences coming back for more. What are the ingredients involved in lifestyle branding strategy? While no two brands are identical, many lifestyle brands have elements in common, including:

Mission & Vision: This is a clear purpose that resonates with your target audience. What do you want your brand to give to your customers and the community as a whole? What are your core principles and values?
Authenticity: Lifestyle brands are unapologetically genuine in their expression. They know who they are, as well as who they are not, and they live their brand. They aren’t looking to replicate the path of others.
Need: Because lifestyle brands offer something deeper than an impersonal relationship between a customer and a product, they create a link that becomes intertwined with a customer’s lifestyle, creating a need and/or solution to a challenge a customer is not willing to part with.
Deep Customer Understanding: This includes knowing their desires, motivations, and aspirations. Creating a lifestyle brand means having a deep understanding of your customers, what motivates their buying behaviors, and what their overall goals and desires are. Lifestyle brands often work to appeal to extremely targeted, niche audiences that are devoted followers of their brand.
Unique Brand Voice: Lifestyle brands have a consistent personality that evokes emotions and connects with your audience. What feeling do you want to invoke in your audience about who you are? Are you warm and friendly? Do you want to be seen as bold and cutting edge? How else do you want to be viewed – hip, playful, adventurous, opulent, trendsetting, quirky, authoritative, or humorous?
Compelling Content: Content includes stories, visuals, and messages that showcase your brand’s values and lifestyle. Effective content for lifestyle brands doesn’t just highlight a product, it highlights how the product fits into an overall lifestyle. Create content that shows your authority but connects with your audience’s emotions, hopes, and dreams.

Five Steps on How to Start a Lifestyle Brand

Just as no two brands are alike, no two journeys to becoming those brands are the same, but here are some general best practices to help get you started:

Define your audience. Having a deep and thorough knowledge of your audience is instrumental in creating a lifestyle brand, but before you can do that, you must first segment them. No brand can be everything to everyone. In today’s dynamic digital era, the buyer’s journey is more intricate than ever. To effectively engage with your audience, you need to break down who they are at an intrinsic level – things like lifestyle, social class, habits, behaviors, and interests. When you take the time to understand who they are, both on the surface and at a psychographic level, you can market your products and services in a way that shows they address your audience’s true desires and concerns.
Cultivate your brand identity. To be successful in selling yourself, you must know who you are. Developing your brand identity includes everything from your logo and fonts to your color scheme and brand voice (playful, serious, witty, etc.). It also means ensuring it is consistent across all facets of your brand.
Develop your brand story. Managing a lifestyle brand isn’t just about presenting a product that can help people realize the life of their dreams. It means creating a brand story to act as a guide for how they can create it.
Create a community.Successful lifestyle brands bring their customers together to create a community of supporters. Hosting events, creating social media groups, and publicizing customer feedback can help create an echo chamber of support, get customers excited about your brand, and foster brand loyalty.
Grow your brand. Build out your product line with items that fully support your lifestyle brand and comprehensively fulfill the needs of your customers. Market your line by emphasizing your brand values.

Tips for Managing Your Lifestyle Brand for Long-Term Success

Once you have figured out how to create your lifestyle brand, here are some tips to help continue to build momentum and sustain it.

Use storytelling. Humans are innately drawn to stories. Don’t just tell them something – paint a picture with your words and provide a narrative for how your brand can support the lifestyle they seek.
Get personal. Lifestyle brands are personal and social. Keep yourself engaged with your target audiences where they are – be part of the conversation about things they care about and showcase your personality and values. This will help build relationships and cultivate lifelong connections with your customers as you manage your lifestyle brand.
Stay consistent. Once you have determined your brand voice, make sure all your outreach and materials support it. You will want to leave space to evolve over time, but a lack of cohesion could cause confusion for your customers, or worse, lead them to distrust you.
Create meaningful relationships. Having quality partners is key to managing a lifestyle brand. Look for opportunities to collaborate with other brands that exude the values you hold and the lifestyle you promote. On the flip side, choose those partners wisely as choosing poorly can damage your brand by association.
Capitalize on influencers to promote your brand. In addition to building connections to strategic partner brands, it is also beneficial to develop relationships with influencers. Influencers who share your values and whose following fits your target market can help you expand your audience, forge a deeper connection with them, and build brand loyalty.
Track metrics and adjust. You can’t know how successful your efforts are unless you set measurable KPIs and monitor them. Look for opportunities to increase efficiency and automation. If something doesn’t seem to be working or bringing the outcome you’d like, you can pivot your approach or tactics to ensure you reach your goals.

Let Paradigm Help You Craft a Thriving Lifestyle Brand

Products may come and go, but your ambition should be to give your brand long-term sustaining power. Creating and managing a lifestyle brand is a captivating and powerful marketing approach that can help your brand achieve the longevity you aim for. As marketers and designers, the team at Paradigm knows that the design experience shapes the consumer’s opinion of a brand positively or negatively. We specialize in providing “wraparound” services, whereby each marketing initiative supports the overall strategic plan to produce a long-term return on investment. Our clients receive the benefit of each team member’s unique area of expertise, which is combined to deliver purpose-driven marketing strategies, solutions, and individual tactics. If we can help guide you on how to create a lifestyle brand with creative and effective graphic design and brand strategy, please contact us today.

About the Author

Madison Deckert is a Senior Account Coordinator at Paradigm. Her superpower is her ability to capitalize on both her creativity and problem-solving prowess to drive client success. In her role, she coordinates the execution of tailored marketing campaigns to achieve unmatched success for our clients. She examines current marketing research and competitive analyses to inform strategy, collaborates with design and development teams to create impactful messaging, social media, and marketing plans, and supports the tactical execution of initiatives to ensure purpose-driven results.

View Bio

Tips, Insights and Trends