By Caroline Forsey

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

He’s done collabs with brands like Nike, Heineken, Crocs, and the NBA … But it’s not all about advertising.

He‘s also a serious artist in his own right, a luminary at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and his work’s been spotlighted everywhere from NBC to The Washington Post to Hypebeast.

In the venn diagram of art, pop culture, and marketing, Matt Zaremba lives smack in the bullseye.

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

1. Want to sell your product? Personify it.

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

Take a recent collab 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 off the shoe, Zaremba doesn’t even blink.

“First off, we know you can run in this thing, but 98% of people buying the shoe are not running. They’re just trying to look cool, probably in a city somewhere… They want to be on-trend,” he tells me, effortlessly spinning a story of who this desired consumer would be. (He’s not wrong — I just bought $160 Cloudnova shoes to look cooler while I run … errands.)

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

From there, his team starts riffing — talking about the state of the world today, and how everyone is a little burnt out, and how sometimes just getting up in the morning is a major accomplishment — and voila. A campaign is born.

“Right off the bat, we came up with this idea that small wins add up. So then we go back to the drawing board… How do we visually represent small wins? How do we give a little wink to running, but keep the human element that people have all sorts of little wins they should celebrate?”

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

And think outside the norms when it comes to that story: Are you sure you’re selling a running shoe, or are you actually selling the message that little wins matter?

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

2. Don’t use the first idea that comes to you – find the fresher angle.

One of Zaremba‘s proudest campaigns is one he did with Nike a few years back. 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 make a splash with a big-name celebrity. …read more

Source:: HubSpot Blog

Author: Aaron