At some point, your company will need a product video. Even if your “product” is a service you provide instead of a tangible object to purchase, you’ll still want to create some form of product video to explain how your service works.
We don’t know about you, but we’re tired of the infomercial-style product video that lists a series of features that overwhelms the viewer with how much a product can do, but doesn’t actually show the user why they need it.
If you want to create something compelling that’ll actually sell a customer on the why behind your product, while also explaining the what and the how, we have an alternative.
Check out this fantastic product video from everyone’s favorite Scandinavian furniture emporium Ikea for a product called “Cook this Page.” The video is from 2017, but still feels fresh today. It’s a product video for a product that’s a riff on Ikea’s build-it-yourself illustrated furniture instructions, except these are a collection of illustrated cooking instructions printed onto cookable parchment paper. Just add food, roll it up, and bake it. It’s brilliant. Check it out here:
[embed_video provider=”youtube” id=”sSaxVypFHP8″ caption=”IKEA: Cook This Page” align=”center” /]
Obviously this isn’t a standalone product here – it’s a promotional tool to promote Ikea’s kitchen and food products. By treating these pages like the product though, the video functions similarly to a traditional product video.
Here are a few quick takeaways you can learn from Ikea to apply to your own product videos, so you can take them from a generic list of features to something more visually creative and impactful to the viewer.
1. Show and tell how it works.
One of the most fun aspects of this video is how visual it is. This product is intelligently designed, with each ingredient illustration made to match the actual proportions of the ingredient in question.
Your key takeaway? Ikea shows you how to use the product. It doesn’t leave us guessing how it all comes together – it shows you the entire process and uses amazing, fun, striking visuals that highlight the practicality of the product and how easy it is to use.
It helps that their product is simple to use, but even if your own product has more than three steps, you can still show exactly how to use it in a similar way.
Ikea’s goal here was to change the way people think about cooking recipes. Your goal should also be to help your potential customers visualize a new way of thinking about the problem your product solves.
2. Blend video genres to create a truly unique video.
In this instance, the whole concept of this “product” was to create a new way of thinking based on a new way of doing.
By inventing a new way to visualize a recipe, Ikea subverted the entire concept of the recipe to inspire Ikea shoppers to think outside of their current cooking habits. To communicate that idea effectively in a video, they had to subvert the idea of the traditional product video.
By all accounts, this video is part product video, highlighting their “Cook this Page” recipes; part educational video, explaining their “Cook this Page” campaign and how it was deployed; part how-to video, instructing how the “Cook this Page” recipes work; and part event video, showing the product and campaign in action at actual Ikea stores.
That’s a whole lot of video types fused into one video, but it totally works. Why?
3. Get to the core of why your product exists, and demonstrate it.
Why did Ikea create this product to begin with? It wasn’t to make a bunch of money selling this new kind of recipe book. Instead, the goal was to change the way their customers think about cooking new recipes.
That’s a simple, but BIG, why.
Changing anyone’s mind about anything is a difficult task. But asking “Why do we think this way about cooking?” and showing a simple and fun alternative is a non-threatening and brilliant way to open at least a few minds to trying something new.
Don’t get us wrong – there was also a monetary benefit behind this goal. By opening up their customers minds to new recipes, they opened themselves up to increased sales of their kitchen and food products. It was a smart play all around. But think about your own product or service. In order to be in business and stay competitive, your company is offering something new or different that might be intimidating or challenging to customers you’re trying to win over. In order to sell them on you, you may need to change their minds and open them up to new possibilities.
In order to do that, your next product video should follow Ikea’s example by getting to the root why of your product. Why should they care about how your product reduces energy consumption? Or why should they improve their toothbrushing experience? Or why does your company save them money on car insurance? To answer that, ask yourself the same question: why?
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