There are many ways to use content to persuade or influence the way people perceive a product. Marketers sometimes create material that influences a target audience by showing users outside of a brands regular audience using the product or service.
The intention is pique the interest of a desired consumer by showing an obscure audience endorsing the product or service that they would not typically use. The rationale is to show that if it’s good enough for them, it would be a really good for the intended consumer.
Showing how a seemingly opposite audience accepts the offering, produces an effective feeling of irony that may persuade both the target audience and possibly it’s alter-ego audience. It’s like creating an ad for a car company trying to appeal to environmentally conscious people who choose to ride their bikes to work, but depict the car-dependent suburbanite as the user of the vehicle. Brand awareness may take form in both have tree-huggers and gasoholics googling the vehicle to get more info on it.
So, what if the product is food? Enter the time-tested and somewhat cliche Taste Test. No actors, only real people tasting a product as the camera captures the moment. Body language, speech, and facial expressions begin to paint the picture of a genuine reaction.
The product being tasted is Sol Cuisine’s Tangy Korean BBQ Meatless Chicken. To set the tone of this experience, we seek the opinion of people who would not typically eat vegetarian food, let alone vegan food. In this case, true carnivores taste the product and provide some pretty interesting views on vegetarians and vegetarian cuisine. The whole thing “clicks”, only if there’s a positive reaction to the food being tasted. If devout meat-eaters like the product, then vegetarians might give it a try.
The candid reactions in an ad makes for some food-for-thought, that’s goal is to get-food-bought. Even more entertaining is listening to what people outside the target audience say about the target audience.
This is merely one way to create influential content. Videos tend to work best in persuading an audience, as most people tend to be more influenced by what they see and hear. However, written pieces, podcasts and webinars, work just as well, when you use the right combination of ingredients to create the polarity needed sway the perception of an audience.
