A glass on a wooden table filled with cider.
It’s a simple picture,… at least, it starts out that way.
But then comes a man with a spray bottle to dapple the edges with frosty condensation. Then comes two hours of careful grading, enhancement and painting in some lens flare behind the glass.
Because it’s not the glass that’s selling this cider. It’s not the cider either.
It’s the story.
The first rule of marketing is this: You’re not selling a product, you’re selling the outcome of a product. You’re selling the feeling the customer gets or the success they achieve.
Anyone can buy a bottle of cider – they’re in rows in supermarket fridges across the nation. But when we put together our campaign for Lancaster Brewery’s Corner Stone Ciders we wanted to sell something more.
We wanted to sell a hot summer day, your throat parched as you sit back and relax. We want to sell you the smell of freshly cut grass and bees zipping through the air, just like that summer you’ll always remember.
The sun is going down and it’s been a long, long day. Now is the time for a crisp, refreshing Cider.
The outcome is the memory. The outcome is relaxation and refreshment.
All it takes is one image to bring that memory flooding back.
An image tells a story.
Frosty condensation tells you that the glass is cold. Cold is refreshing. The precise angle of a lens flare tells you that it’s both sunny and that the sun is low on the horizon – the end of the day. With just two choices we have our story: cool refreshment at the end of a sunny day.
A picture of a toy ship in a window tells you very little. A picture of a toy ship in a window with a boy pressing his face to the glass, eyes wide and eager, tells a story.
We spend a lot of time on our stories. Sometimes we tell them with words and sometimes we tell them with images.
What stories could we tell for you?
