There are few things more powerful than a real-world story and ‘Lived experience’ has been the tool of marketers pretty much since the discipline came into existence.
It’s why brands put customer reviews of their product up front. It’s why influencers who genuinely love a product are infinitely better than influencers who are faking it. It’s why you’re more likely to buy something if a friend recommends it.
At Arch Creative, we’re constantly looking for new ways to market products and services. Whether that’s through design, branding, advertising or video, there’s always something new that we can add to a company’s output. We’ve combined our lateral, out-of-the-box thinking with our belief in the power of real-world stories to create Moving Lives – our framework for creating the perfect customer-centric marketing through lived experiences.
The Moving Lives framework is based on customer interviews. We develop a list of questions which are crafted to get the best out of our interviewees, then use their answers to create on-brand, emotion-inducing animations. We’re capturing people’s lives, and making them move. The combination of interview and animation allow our subjects to preserve their anonymity – which can be crucial if your product or service is of a sensitive nature. It works perfectly if you’re a charitable organisation or a government body.
Here’s a breakdown of the full process:
Research: First off, we do the research. This includes outreach to recruitment networks, building our survey questions, analysing responses and selecting participants.
Engagement: From there, we create discussion guides to get the ideal responses, prepare candidates, set up interviews and obtain any necessary permissions.
Data collection: Next up, we’re ready to start talking. We interview our candidates, which can take place over several days of filming, then review our transcripts and select audio.
Creative: now we have the material, we create a suite of videos, that combine the edited interview audio with animation. The video process includes concept designs, storyboarding, illustrating, animating, editing, amendments, sourcing music and, of course, rendering the final files.
The process also involves the work of an incredible behavioural change agency. They consult on the development of questions, the routes to changing mindsets and the psychological impact of our videos.
Our first Moving Lives project was for the Department for Transport. Our mission was to create a suite of videos to educate DfT staff on the perils of disabled passengers. We worked alongside the behavioural change agency to develop a series of questions designed to elicit answers that could convince DfT staff to genuinely act differently.
These recorded interviews were then paired with animations, developed in-house. Our video series made a huge impact on shifting the perceptions of staff at the DfT. It’s one thing sitting down staff and having HR explain to them what they can do for passengers with disabilities. It’s an entirely different impact when staff hear it from the mouths of their customers.
You’ll have already seen that there are loads of benefits to the Moving Lives model. Here they are summarised in brief:
We’re actively seeking new businesses and charities who want to incorporate Lived Experiences in their messaging. If this is you, we want to talk!