Bodega’s Matt Zaremba on How to Avoid Empty Calorie Marketing

Art and marketing are made for each other, and this week’s master proves that.

He’s done collabs with brands like Nike, Heineken, Crocs, and the NBA … But it’s not all about advertising.

He‘s also a serious artist in his own right, a luminary at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and his work’s been spotlighted everywhere from NBC to The Washington Post to Hypebeast.

In the venn diagram of art, pop culture, and marketing, Matt Zaremba lives smack in the bullseye.

And it makes me think I should really get a hobby.

1. Want to sell your product? Personify it.

You get the sense that Matt Zaremba’s mind is always in story mode.

Take a recent collab with ASICS on an older, previously archived running shoe: When asked how his team came up with the “Small Wins Add Up” campaign to show off the shoe, Zaremba doesn’t even blink.

“First off, we know you can run in this thing, but 98% of people buying the shoe are not running. They’re just trying to look cool, probably in a city somewhere… They want to be on-trend,” he tells me, effortlessly spinning a story of who this desired consumer would be. (He’s not wrong — I just bought $160 Cloudnova shoes to look cooler while I run … errands.)

“So then I ask myself, ‘What’s the sentiment? This product walks into a room… What does it look like and sound like? Does it have an accent? How can we personify it?'”

From there, his team starts riffing — talking about the state of the world today, and how everyone is a little burnt out, and how sometimes just getting up in the morning is a major accomplishment — and voila. A campaign is born.

“Right off the bat, we came up with this idea that small wins add up. So then we go back to the drawing board… How do we visually represent small wins? How do we give a little wink to running, but keep the human element that people have all sorts of little wins they should celebrate?”

Zaremba does this for all his marketing campaigns, and it’s sound advice: Get to know the ins and outs of your product, and what story people will tell themselves when they buy it.

And think outside the norms when it comes to that story: Are you sure you’re selling a running shoe, or are you actually selling the message that little wins matter?

Because at the end of the day, a Stanley is just a water bottle with a really cool story.

2. Don’t use the first idea that comes to you – find the fresher angle.

One of Zaremba‘s proudest campaigns is one he did with Nike a few years back. It was a big moment for him — at the time, Nike was one of the biggest brands he’d ever worked with.

Zaremba knew it would be easy to make a splash with a big-name celebrity. He could stick the shoes on LeBron and call it a day. (Relatable, I know).

But he didn’t want to do that.

“The shoe reminded my team of our childhood — it kind of tapped into the Sandlot (the movie). So we decided to take a moment to reflect our own team. We did a yearbook shoot of all our actual employees wearing a special jacket we made, along with the sneakers. And we had the school-picture cloud background.”

“We presented the campaign as ‘This is who we are, and who we are is the same as you.’”

I‘ll admit most marketers aren’t regularly working with Lebron-sized budgets, but the takeaway still matters: Your first idea is probably the too-obvious one, and you should keep thinking. Unexpected angles will surprise your audience and make them feel like they’re seeing something new.

And ideally, they’ll see pieces of themselves in your marketing then, too.

3. Marketing should make your buyer feel confident — not insecure.

Fashion is a notoriously confidence-crushing industry. Plenty of major fashion and beauty brands thrive off making their consumers feel less-than. They want you to know you’re not cool yet, but you will be when you wear those jeans or that jacket.

But Zaremba calls that kind of marketing “empty calories and empty suits.”

“Sure, you’ll find a cohort of people who you’ll grow with because you’re showing them what they’re not. But eventually they’ll find a brand that makes them feel like they are enough, and they’ll switch to that brand,” he says.

His MO? Being as humble and relatable as possible: “Fashion brands should offer tweaks to your journey of style and culture. I don‘t want to talk down to people and say, ’Oh, you don‘t know this musician?’ I‘d rather be like, ’You gotta check this out.’ There should be no ego in it.”

Whether you’re a B2C or B2B marketer, the sentiment stands — personifying your brand as the “cool kid” works for some brands, but what works better for most is simply being helpful, curious, and encouraging.