Importance of People in Marketing

An interesting conversation over the holiday season sparked a great question about marketing. The question was about perfume and cologne ads and why they literally had nothing to do with what the fragrance smelled like. This style of marketing refers to lifestyle marketing and serves to highlight the importance of people when it comes to marketing and advertisement.

Lifestyle marketing is a term that gets thrown around very frequently in marketing circles. It refers to a campaign or specific ad that focuses on people living a certain way that is then paralleled with the product. The resulting idea in a viewer or consumer’s mind is that if they purchase product X, then they will be closer to achieving lifestyle Y. This plays on human inductive reasoning, sometimes false, is very effective.

The effectiveness of this marketing lays in our desire as a species to seek out other humans. Therein lies the importance of people in marketing. We not only trust humans, but like them more than any logo.

Humans, over thousands of years of evolution, have gained to ability to seek out human faces in places where they may not be. This has led to such things as finding the face on Mars or seeing faces in spilled coffee or burnt toast. From a biological stance, this dates back to early man in that a human face indicated a lessor threat. This is to say that humans were less of a threat than wild animals. In fact, there was safety in numbers in those cases. From this, a sense of trust of other humans has grown part of many cultures, especially if you “know” that person in the case of a celebrity.

This has gone so far as the humanization of cartoon characters on cereal boxes. Remember that the next time you see a commercial with that handsome actor you saw in a movie, marketers want you to trust them and engage with their brand on a genetic level.