Experiential Marketing is possibly the most fun you and your client can have with a brand!

Experiential marketing?is pretty simple and possibly the most fun you and your client can have with a brand. ?It's a campaign or event that involves people engaging with the brand or the product in a memorable way.

It has been around ever since a market trader has encouraged a punter to try one of his apples. Making wild claims about the quality, how juicy and fresh his product is, cutting an apple in front of you and offering it skilfully balanced on his knife. You feel obliged to buy from him because he has engaged you with his banter and made you feel special, he will no doubt throw in a couple of plums and that buys your loyalty next time you’re in the neighbourhood. These are all sensory experiences wrapped in the theatre of market shopping – grass roots experiential marketing.

There are many theories, dimensions and must do lists connected to Experiential Marketing, most of them valid. The one word I would throw in the hat is “Disrupt”. We aim to disrupt, change normal behaviour or encourage a brand loyalty switch, by shaking the consumer tree to see what falls out. How hard we shake it depends on the audience and how hard they are holding on to their favoured brand!

Understanding your target audience is one of the main pillars of success. Demographics and as much data as possible is important, however we should dig deeper and understand on a human level, what flicks the switch of our audience. What do they listen to? What car do they drive? Where do they shop? Do they have kids and how much time have they got? This is what will shape the way you interact and hopefully prevent you inviting the Women’s Institute to a drum and base night.

How we absorb media and do our shopping nowadays has completely changed the landscape of marketing. The on-line revolution means we must hunt deeper and harder to capture the audience. It’s true that it is possible to create an on-line experience that is personalised, disruptive, even emotional and intellectual. The rise of digital printing and the ability to automate the web to print process means we have personalised Toblerone’s and Kit-Kats which arrive in the post following an on-line interaction. Is this experiential marketing? I think yes?

The sensory element is harder to apply on-line. Arguably, the most memorable and emotive of all the tools we have in the experiential marketing shed. If we want to really get inside our audience head, we need to play with what they smell, see, hear and finally touch on their way to discovering the product. This is where “Live” trumps all other media vehicles and we can start to play with Gin Clouds, Skydive Simulators, Space Jumps and everything in-between.

The live journey should include positive memory points linked to the brand, why? because we want to be able to trigger a recall to those positive thoughts later when we reintroduce the same smell, sound or feeling. If we make the activation smell of oranges, then the next time you smell oranges your brain will trigger the positive memory and you will think of the brand or product. How many times have you said “oh that’s smells like……” because it reminds you of something?

Now we have planted a sensory “brand seed” in our consumers mind, when they are next at a point of purchase (POP), we stimulate those sensory memories, bring back the positive brand interaction, which should then influence the purchase decision. The experience must not stop at the activation. It must have room to grow beyond the first point of contact.

This brings us onto another important consideration, the objective. Experiential marketing fills several objective holes, not limited to, but including: selling product at a POP, creating incredible brand awareness, sample products and leverage sponsorship.???

The objective, may of course, be just for brand awareness in a crowded environment like a festival. We developed a mobile skydive simulator, hovercrafts and an incredibly scary Drop Slide, for a beer brand that wanted to break into the festival market. It worked in terms of bar sales and to an extent did put the brand on the festival map for three years. In this case the objective was brand awareness, where the bar sales had to cover the cost of the activation. So, a big call to action was needed which had good spectator value and consumers were prepared to queue for. This gave us a very high dwell time in which folks sampled the beer and subsequently went on to make multiple purchases from the bar. In some cases, probably too many multiple purchases, considering we were going to subject them to a skydiving experience!

Equally, the activation could be at a point of purchase, like a Top End Grocer. Sampling at supermarkets is an art form that is sadly being lost back to the blue rinse brigade with cocktail sticks, normally hiding behind a most uneventful pop-up desk, un-strategically placed and may as well be on Mars. ?

Introducing the consumer to a new or elevated product requires us to investigate the psychology of a modern shopper. In the most part, humans are habitual. We like routine and when it comes to the weekly shop, we tend to go into autopilot, with tunnel vision and a mission to get in and out with the least amount of stress or decision making. That’s why we make a shopping list at home. If you forget the list, odds are you won’t remember what’s on it. Why? because as far as your head is concerned, it’s already in the basket.

We park in the same area in the car park. We acquire our trolley or basket from the same point, and we enter using the same door. The shopping goggles are now fully on! We use a well-trodden route around the store, with any deviation sending our routine into a geographical nightmare because we must come out of our weekly sleepwalk shop.

Our shop keepers know this. That’s why every now and then, you go into the store, and things are not where they are supposed to be because the clever grocers have moved it all around a bit. It’s a deliberate disruption to their customers routine shop. If they didn’t make us think every now and then, they would sell the same products week in and week out, and that does nothing for company growth or the introduction of new products.?

A well thought out sampling campaign must also disrupt the norm!?

IMHO this disruption should ideally start in the car park (that may not be possible, just avoid being on Mars!) and catch the imagination of the shopper before they get their shopping goggles on. If they sample something they like outside, it was a memorable experience and it broke the monotony of the weekly shop, they will be looking for it inside, which means goggles off. So, the brand journey needs to continue with creative POS and importantly a well briefed, interested brand ambassador next to the product in store. Ideally every sample should come with some kind of physical redemption, either discounted product or a give-away on proof of purchase.

In the heady days of the Birds Eye Roadshow, we used to park 12m articulated promotional trailers outside stores, live cooking samples for five days at a time and get massive uplifts which were sustained long after the roadshow had left. We negotiated gondolier ends, had more wobblers than a political party and gave away a warehouse of branded t-towels. That was the naughty’s when FAST marketing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FAST_marketing was all the rage and TV viewing wasn’t as fragmented as it is now.?

Measurement was one of the reasons experiential marketing started to erode the above the line budgets, as more money was being put below the line to fund experiential. The bigger ATL agencies could see that brand managers wanted verified measurements on their marketing campaigns, and experiential campaigns could supply tangible data and uplifts almost instantly.

The measurement or KPI’s should be linked to the objective, one of the best measurement mechanics is redemption. Redemption vouchers link directly to a purchase or a digital interaction, can be monitored, so the data is almost instantly available. The consumer is delighted because they get a free mug if they buy the product they have just tasted and liked. It’s a no brainer!

Making the activation sharable is another measurement mechanic, extending the reach beyond the activation. Viral being the holy grail we strive for, is why influencers are now camping out in our experiential marketing shed. I have first-hand experience of this powerful tool, by linking with https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvSCbE11t2g Devon Supertramp we created an opening video for WB, that had a reach of over eight million views. I have no doubt that it was Devon’s influencing, influence that gave the video the platform to grow.

Successful experiential marketing campaigns should work toward accomplishing the following:

o?? The brand is well represented. It’s clear who’s hosting the experience, and the campaign is relevant and on-brand.

o?? The experience is memorable and engages customers in unexpected ways beyond standard advertisements.

o?? The experience is measurable.

Go and create the extraordinary, try and touch every sense and take your audience on a journey. Don't be scared to be different, it is the difference that makes you stand out. If the idea makes you smile and be excited, then that's a good sign. Good luck....