People are tired of so much information in their daily lives. One-sided interactions with brands, excessive content that doesn’t align with their profile, and too many news stories are, more than ever, creating a need to escape this reality. Although this trend may be harmful to brands, it can also be strategically guided by marketing to help users relax their minds while simultaneously enabling financial returns for companies – a strategy known in the market as the escapism economy.
When asked why they want to escape reality, 42% of Brazilians said they seek to escape ‘their own minds,’ while 34% justified this trend due to ‘the news,’ according to a global study by McCann Worldgroup – an information overload that encompasses all the online interactions users encounter daily, not just from news portals, but also from paid ads by various companies.
Lacking this care can be extremely detrimental to a brand’s prosperity and profitability. Further according to McCann Worldgroup’s global study, as proof of this, 44% of consumers want brands to understand their frustrations, along with 56% who wish for brands to provide dreams. Those that don’t track and meet these demands will certainly lose market share, harming their image, reputation, and longevity.
The data from the study highlights the importance of distractions as a healthy way to cope with daily stress. In this scenario, a good marketing strategy can find ways to interact with this audience in a less aggressive and one-sided manner, building campaigns and delivering messages that are more assertive, relevant, and not excessive. That is, exploring the theme of escapism in interactions with people, aiming not just for a sale but for creating a connection.
Further according to the McCann study, this escapism economy already generates $10 trillion and is expected to reach $13.9 trillion by 2028, turning marketable products into moments of distraction that not only help people dealing with high-stress situations but also allow brands to create sales opportunities that yield better internal results and greater consumer satisfaction.
To achieve these goals, strategies such as advertainment, storytelling, branded content, product placement, guerrilla marketing, and UGC have proven effective in presenting companies and their products in creative ways, capturing special attention simply by being different from the usual.
Use these tools and strategies with creativity and planning, instead of simply producing generic, unintelligent ads that fail to attract, retain, and engage the target audience. If it takes more time than usual to create assets that genuinely capture attention and build brand recall for your brand, do it! For years, the market has shown that ‘marketing that doesn’t look like marketing’ is among the most effective.
Creating a connection with an audience exhausted by so much information in their lives is truly challenging. After all, when a person has a bad experience with your company, that sentiment can linger for a long time, potentially harming decades of sales. But once that bond is formed, it becomes strong enough to transform the lifetime value of the customer and the brand’s reputation against its competitors.
