From truth to sense.
“Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving,” Albert Einstein.
True. One of the major life efforts is finding the ‘right’ measure of things, while maintaining your own rhythm. It seems that we spend our entire life balancing between extremes: between healthy and unhealthy, active and passive, renunciation and enjoyment, exceptional comfort and extreme discomfort, and ultimately between freedom and security. Things start getting complicated the moment this equation is joined by the ratio of social and psychological roles that we play every day – being a parent, being an employee, being someone’s child … setting boundaries, but remaining flexible and so on. Daily life is tiring. Constant balancing is tiring. And we are always left with the question: “could have we done things better?”, and that trace of guilt.
At the end of 2014, the phenomenon of balancing all the important aspects of life was the focus of the study by McCann Truth Central “The truth about wellness”, ie the degree of achieved psychophysical balance. Findings pointed to a strong controversy: The coexistence of intense need for balancing of all aspects of life (physical, mental, financial, social, emotional aspects) and the extremely low level of willingness to achieve it. What does this finding suggests? Lack of will has to do with many factors (internal, external …), but is a variable category. In this context, there is room for intervention of brands and technologies that can offer concrete solutions – help achieve harmony, with or without our will.
The emergence of functional apps is one of the best and most popular examples. From those that serve as protection from mosquitoes to those that are planning a vacation for us. Their functionality and meaning in everyday life also determine their level of performance and durability. Imagine that you belong to the group of ‘cautious consumers’ who are extremely cautious about the composition of food and their calorie intake. Even for this kind of needs there are countless applications. For example FOODUCATE that allows scanning products in the store, assessing food according to nutritional value and telling you what you actually enter. At the same time, this app has the option of recommending an alternative, while calculating your calorie intake. Useful, isn’t it? OR for example, you are not sure what to choose, you need a recommendation, an opinion of others … CONSUMR gives you a shortcut to user reviews on a given subject, it introduces their experiences and recommendations, and facilitates decision-making … So, expediency must be clear immediately – while you are saying the name of the app.
It’s the same with specific products, or a concept of product or service. One of the best initiatives in the past, in our market, was the MAXI’s SUPERUČAK! Packed lunch for school children, which represents not only nutritionally balanced meal, but skillfully balances between the needs of modern responsible parents and modern, demanding children (variety of foods, offer, packaging).
Why is this a great example of new practices that context imposes?
“The truth about the new Serbian mum”, a study by McCann Truth Central from 2013, indicated the strong need of mothers who simultaneously play several roles, for solutions that simplify their daily functioning and accelerate their transition from one role to another (parent, employee, wife, friend, woman…). SUPERUČAK is a perfect example of the brand initiative that simultaneously satisfies her complex needs (including the most exhausting one – to balance their need to provide quality meal to a child, without remorse; the child’s need to enjoy and have fun; her need to simplify her daily routine … and all this in a circle). This is the reason why I can’t talk about SUPERUČAK as a product, but a serious brand initiative. This is an example of the way in which we should go – from truth to sense.
The text was published on the portal: Media Marketing
