Bodega’s Matt Zaremba on How to Avoid Empty Calorie Marketing – InstantFollowerz

Art and marketing are made for each other, and this week’s master proves it.

He has collaborated with brands such as Nike, Heineken, Crocs and the NBA… But it’s not all about advertising.

He is a serious artist in his own right, a luminary at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and his work has been featured everywhere from NBC to The Washington Post for Hypebeast.

In the Venn diagram of art, pop culture and marketing, Matt Zaremba lives in the eye.

And that makes me think I should really get a hobby.

1. Want to sell your product? Personify it.

You get the feeling that Matt Zaremba’s mind is always in story mode.

Take a recent collaboration with ASICS on an older, previously archived running shoe: When asked how his team came up with the “Small Wins Add Up” campaign to show the shoe, Zaremba doesn’t even blink.

“First, we know you can run in this thing, but 98% of people who buy shoes don’t run. They’re just trying to look cool, probably somewhere in the city… They want to be trendy,” he tells me, effortlessly spinning a story about who this desired consumer would be. (He’s not wrong — I just bought $160 Cloudnova shoes to make me look cooler when I run… errands.)

“Then I ask myself, ‘What’s the sentiment? This product goes into the room… What does it look and sound like? Does he have an accent? How can we personify it??'”

From there, his team starts cracking up – talking about the state of the world today, and how everyone’s a little burnt out, and how sometimes just getting up in the morning is a big success – and voila. The campaign was born.

“We immediately came up with the idea that small victories add up. So then we go back to the drawing board… How to visually represent small victories? How do we give a little wink to running but keep the human element so that people have all kinds of little victories that they should celebrate?”

Zaremba does this for all its marketing campaigns, and it’s good advice: Get to know all the details of your product and what story people will tell themselves when they buy it.

And think outside the box when it comes to that story: are you sura are you selling running shoes, or are you actually selling the message that small victories matter?

Because at the end of the day, Stanley is just a bottle of water with a really cool story.

2. Don’t use the first idea that comes to mind – find fresher English.

One of Zaremba’s proudest campaigns is the one he did with Nike a few years ago. It was a big moment for him – at the time, Nike was one of the biggest brands he’d ever worked with.

Zaremba knew it would be easy to impress a celebrity with a big name. He could stick shoes on LeBron and be done. (Related, I know).

But he didn’t want to do that.

“The shoe reminded my team of our childhood – somehow it made it into The Sandlot (the movie). So we decided to take a moment to reflect on our own team. We shot a yearbook of all our employees wearing a special jacket we made, complete with sneakers. And we had a background of clouds with school pictures.”

“We presented the campaign as “This is us, and who we are is the same as you.'”

I’ll admit that most marketers don’t regularly work with LeBron-sized budgets, but the bottom line is still important: Your first idea is probably too obvious, and you should keep thinking. Unexpected angles will surprise your audience and make them feel like they’re seeing something new.

And ideally they would see the pieces yourself then also in your marketing.

3. Marketing should make your customer feel safe, not insecure.

Fashion is a notorious confidence-busting industry. Plenty of big fashion and beauty brands thrive on making their consumers feel less than. They want you to know you’re not cool morebut you will be when you put on those jeans or that jacket.

But Zaremba calls that kind of marketing “empty calories and empty suits.”

“Of course, you will find a group of people that you will grow with because you show them what they are not. But eventually they’ll find a brand that makes them feel like they’re enough and they’ll switch to that brand,” he says.

Hi MO? To be as modest and appropriate as possible: “Fashion brands should offer settings on your journey of style and culture. I don’t want to talk to people and say, ‘Oh, you don’t know this musician?’ I’d rather say, ‘You have to check this out.’ There should be no ego involved.”

Whether you’re a B2C or B2B marketer, the sentiment stands — personifying your brand as the “cool kid” works for some brands, but what works better for most is simply being helpful, curious, and encouraging.