Selfie Trend: The Gen-Y Way of Experiential Marketing

T alking of the latest concepts being practiced and implemented in the marketing field, I came across this peculiar idea, which many of the brands have been now working on and in fact considering an important aspect of their business strategies is the use of “selfie trend”.

T his is not just another blog on the selfie fever but it will tell you about how it is used nowadays more constructively by market giants to help their business grow. Apart from selfie trend being used as a marketing strategy, I have a few more amazing facts related to the “not so new found” method of taking a picture of your own, and by “not so new found”, I mean that the technique is nearly 200 years old. Unbelievable it is, right?

Why is the trend growing? Why are selfies so popular?

T aking a selfie has become a compulsory activity or I could even term it as a ritual that youngsters follow and perform.

1. It had become famous even before the invention of any of our popular social media platforms but with youngsters accessing applications such as Snapchat and Instagram which have been specifically developed to only share pictures and moments, selfie fever is increasing d-o-d to the point that people are obsessed with capturing moments using the best possible camera phone.
2. Taking a selfie comes naturally to people, anything and everything which attracts people’s attention or in simple words looks beautiful, encourages people to click pictures. People roam around in search of eye catching and pretty backgrounds to click pictures and make it a memorable one. Everybody wants to look their best in pictures and want to buy a camera which can take amazing pictures, the smartphone companies are doing exactly what one desires the most. Setting up a selfie booth has become a mandatory practice by all companies to promote their idea, brand or product. Also, it is the simplest and fun way to send a message across.
3. Top notch smart phone brands are taking an advantage of the popularity of selfies or pictures, if I say in general and have even been creating taglines such as #selfieexpertandleader, #capturetherealyou based upon the capability of the phones they are selling to click better selfies or pictures.
4. The brands are roping in popular names from Bollywood and sports industry to show how amazing selfies can be clicked using their phone to impress youngsters and increase their market share because the youth looks up to these icons as their role model and if they recommend clicking pictures from a particular phone, they would happily oblige.
5. Basically, the youth is obsessed with clicking pictures anywhere and at any hour of the day and marketers are obsessed with the obsession of youngsters, which is their love for selfies. It’s a loop!

How is the trend influencing experiential marketing and is the idea working?

C onnecting our selfie trend topic to the experiential marketing technique, a conclusion can be drawn that selfie and experiential marketing are both inevitable aspects of making a product popular among the latest generation people.

To name one brand which is in trend currently is OPPO, which is selling its latest model OPPO F5 with a campaign surrounding the idea of selfie #Capturetherealyou. This phone is unique because it has a 20 MP camera for taking selfies while its rear mounted camera is of 16 MP and a pixel per inch density of 402, this difference between the resolution of two cameras and the amount of its ppi density clearly tells us about the craze of selfie amongst the people today. We are all aware of this new ad campaign doing the rounds and our favorite Bollywood icons and other sports icons participating in it.

What draws our attention towards the newly launched F5 is that it does not only take nice selfies, which all of us look forward to but it also enhances our beauty by using some amazing features such as contouring to enhance the symmetry between facial features, which give us the perfect looking faces sans any spots or attributes that we do not like to flaunt otherwise. It even rectifies jawline and makes one’s eyes look shinier than usual. It is an undeniable fact that such advertisements capture the interest of our youth because everybody wants a smartphone that can take amazing pictures.

It is not just this brand which has been trying to up its market share by making fruitful use of a millennial trend but, there are many other manufacturers who have been trying to bank upon a similar strategy. Phones have become an inevitable part of our lives and so has the habit of taking pictures.

Statistics say that the market share of Chinese manufacturers of smartphones has been increasing every quarter, if I talk about the difference between first and the second quarter itself of 2017, the growth had been of about 3% in the market share. OPPO came up at the second position in terms of market share after rolling out phones which had the best in class cameras and added features to take better pictures, which clearly means it is loved and preferred strongly by its users.

Different manufacturers do not stop at just making the camera better and displaying ad campaigns showcasing a nice selfie experience, they keep trying to add as many features to it as they can, some examples are: selfie flash, the rear camera (which is considered to be better than the front camera) being used to click selfies by flipping it over, dual selfie camera and so on.

T here are many more inventions/ additions/ improvements to be made in the selfie camera till the time the love for selfies does not die, which is a hard thing to happen anytime soon or in many years from now. Thus, the love for capturing moments will only increase in the near future with phones being launched having better resolution, PPIs, colors and any company working in this direction will surely top the charts.

A  nd in the end, it is all about amazing experience, selfies are the new age way of creating experiences and the brand which while selling its products creates an atmosphere providing rich user experience and uses interactive methods for promotion is preferred over others. Thus, many companies which work on experiential marketing lines and provide a marvelous user experience are bound to be loved more. #Selfieforbusiness