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What marketers need to understand about love in the digital age

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By Michelle Snodgrass, Vice President, Director of Strategy

February 14, 2019 | 5 min read

Whether it’s a new match on Bumble or a couple celebrating their 20th wedding anniversary, the geographic boundaries and barriers that we used to see as an obstacle to being in a relationship are disappearing.

What marketers need to understand about love in the digital age

If you think about it, just a few years back the idea of a couple sharing an intimate dinner thousands of miles apart from each other would have seemed absurd. Today, with a calendar invite, a mutual order from Doordash (in two different cities), and two screens, it’s now a reality. And that’s just one example of how the idea of a relationship has evolved in such a short amount of time.

This shift of modern relationships from physical to digital requires a shift in our thinking of how we connect people as marketers.

New approaches for old occasions

Intimate dinners, a night at the movies, sharing your favorite TV show, and vacation planning are all occasions that transform completely when you’re apart from your partner. That means that sometimes the old ways couples interacted with our products don’t have the impact on our bottom line as they once did.

Reimagining these occasions for the digital age opens up new business opportunities, as well as new ways to connect. Just recently, Kayak introduced its Rendezvous feature, which helps people in two different places find a mutually economic place to travel to together. In a world where vacation packages are designed for travelers leaving together from the same location, this saves time and energy for those who are away from the ones they love.

Experiences don’t always need to be physical

While sometimes it may feel that technology continues to pull us further apart, it can also bring us closer together. Marketers have an opportunity to help create, nurture, and enhance these digital relationships — and their customer will love them all the more for it.

This is something the makers of the Long-Distance Friendship Lamp, John Harrison & Vanessa Whalen, understood well. So, they created a connected lamp that glows in the home of the person you’re away from when you touch it in your own home.

From Skype to FaceTime to now Facebook Portal and Echo Show – the largest technology companies are all vying to be the platform that connects people who are separated by distances near and far.

Brands that want to enter this space need to make it simple for people to share experiences. Some companies are already on board with this. Rabbit, for instance, lets you sync your Netflix or Hulu so you're watching at the same time as a friend or loved one, and you can communicate at the same time, but not be in the same place.

Data enhances connections

Another way brands can be both relevant and non-intrusive is smart use of data. One approach is harnessing data that’s shared between companies with common goals.

For example, let’s say two people on Bumble match. Based on the shared interests in their profiles, the app might recommend a few options for dinner or a show, as suggested by Time Out or Thrillist, which are experts in the experience and entertainment industry. But that only works if data is used in the right way.

Which gets us to our last point…

Don’t ruin the mood

Ultimately, it becomes a question of those places in time and space where we as consumers have become accustomed and accept that a brand will reach out. You can do your brand injustice by stepping into a space that is very intimate between people.

Never position a brand as a replacement for that human connection. A great example is a recent campaign by Skype. The essence of its message was, "Look, our technology may make connecting possible, but we recognize that there is no substitute for the human connection."

As brand marketers, we need to recognize that our role and responsibility is to support, to enable, to encourage, to celebrate the human connection – not replace it. And when we do, customers will show us the love, too.

Michelle Snodgrass is vice-president, director of strategy at Vizeum; Rod Alanis, vice-president, strategy, at Dentsu Aegis Network, coauthored the article

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