How are you tailoring your customer’s overall experience? Are you creating a shopping experience that taps into inclusion, emotion, and engagement? As a brand, it’s highly important that you consider these factors in your marketing strategies. Imagine your ideal customer picking up a magazine or scrolling through his or her Instagram to find that every image and model looks the same. They found no one to relate to.
For the past several years companies and brands alike have been struggling to find the balance between marketing a beautiful yet realistic image to their customers. The controversy over whether brands should or should not use re-touching in their marketing campaigns has been an ongoing issue for years. In this Refinery29 article on retouching, one can see just how much retoucher’s put into making a photo “perfect.” The question is, is retouching wrong and if not, how much is too much?
Celebrities such as Zendaya, Kate Winslet, Kiera Knightley, Demi Lovato and Ashely Benson have been known to speak out on the “unrealistic ideals of beauty,” as quoted by Zendaya. These celebrities are making an effort to influence the standard that these brands market towards their audiences. Powerful influencers such as photographer Annie Leibovitz have been able to create authentic photos displaying celebrity influencers such as Amy Schumer and Serena Williams in an authentic and positive way.
In the world of media, marketers have the power to create the image and experience that they want their brand to portray. What is your brand saying to your audience? As a brand, it’s important that you are positively positioning yourselves in the mind of your customers. The image you portray will greatly affect how your customers and ideal influencers will identify with you. While it’s important to have a niche focus, it’s as equally important to make sure that everyone in that niche is included and accounted for.
One of the goals of influencer marketing is to connect with your audience by finding an influencer who is a realistic and positive reflection of your brand. A brand’s ability to do this will greatly impact how effectively they will be able to communicate with their target customers.
On our Instagram, @DiscoverLMS, we highlight a diverse set of influencers with a goal to identify the ones who will positively align with your brand. Make sure that you are following us on there to see how you should be shaping your customers’ and influencers’ experience.