THE TOP FIVE EXPERIENTIAL MARKETING LOCATIONS OF 2019

Planning the right locations for your brand's trade and consumer events is critical to its success. If you’re considering where to take your brand in 2019, this article outlines the why, where and how, to help guide your planning and inform your wish list.

By Joel Kaufman, MD of experiential marketing agency, Link Communication (2018 Gold Award winner for ‘The Most Effective Retail Sales Experience).

5. RETAILER HEAD OFFICES

Photo: Princes presented their range of tinned fish on a tour of retailer head offices using a pop up restaurant experience with a 12 item menu to choose from.

Multiple man-marking: Excuse the football terminology here, but it seems appropriate, as every time one of our clients mentions that they’re stocked in Sainsbury’s, the sentence is immediately followed by: “…but our buyer has just changed again!” Sound familiar? Despite the importance of the retail buyer relationship it often hangs precariously in the balance of just one key contact. Sampling at retailer head offices allows your lead buyer to sample what they stock and also for the entire buying team to become familiar with your brand too.

Public endorsement: When you show off your brand at your retailer’s head office, you’re also showing off the wise stock listing decision that your buyer has made. This unspoken, but highly public endorsement by the buyer, puts their stamp of approval on your products in front of all their colleagues; so when it comes to tough range change decisions, they’re less likely to de-list you, as it would imply that they got it wrong.

Experiential understanding: If we are being honest, your relationship with your retailers is often only as meaningful as a fluctuating number on their spread sheet. Presenting perfectly prepared tasters from your product range, from an attractively styled event area that reflects your brand ethos is a very powerful, positive experience. Take your product range out of its packet and presenting it as intended, brings your USPs to life like no other form of marketing media can achieve.

4. CONSUMER EVENTS

Photo: Fulfil Nutrition exhibit at a range of lifestyle events, but also created their own FitFest with lifestyle coaches to broadcast across social and traditional media.

Antennae up: In today’s over-saturated digital media landscapes, your target audience are often too busy or too preoccupied to notice any of your marketing output. By contrast, consumer events reach a perfectly aligned audience, when they are fully open and ready to engage with your brand. Consumer events are where people have their antennae up, openly receptive, keen to explore and learn about how your brand might just be perfect for them.

Get real and get targeting: As virtual our world is in 2019, real humans still do interact with other real humans. For every niche Facebook group or Twitter and Insta hashtag you can imagine, there are real people getting together, to explore the real world activities they love, where they can discover brands that matter in that space. There are so many events and differing site fees to suit all budgets. With expert guidance and experience, you will find the consumer events that will work for your brand. And if you can't find one that suits you, you can always create an event of your very own!

Content creation: Effective experiential doesn’t ignore social media, but creates a vibrant source of positive, meaningful content for your brand. If you’re still posting tenuous pictures of cute kittens each weekend, please stop it and catch up! Creating fun experiences that reward consumers for posing for photos and posting them with your campaign hashtags, is public endorsement that normal media spend just can’t buy. Consumer events are perfect for this type of social media content creation; where thousands of your demographically aligned consumers have the time and impetus to engage on social with your brand, generating a connection that lasts far longer than the event itself.

3. TRADE SHOWS

Photo: Typhoo Tea used a touring exhibition unit with promotional team across a range of events for a mix of trade development and consumer outreach.

Go with a game plan: With more than 20 years’ experience of helping brands to represent themselves effectively at trade shows, the most common upgrade we give from the base line promotional staffing support, is a clear game plan. What does your success look like? What do you want to walk away with in terms of contact details captured, leads made and actual sales deals done. Don’t be one of the newbies, who stands petrified behind the desk waiting to see what washes up on their shore.

Do me a deal: Major exhibitions like IFE 2019 attract thousands of VIPs and retail buyers but they are only there for just a few days before they disappear from view. To make sure your brand captures the moment, seizes the day and strikes while the iron is hot – you need to work out a killer show deal that prospective customers can’t just walk past or ‘think about’ (which really means they quickly forget). What’s your show deal that they just can’t walk away from? Work something out that’s so good, they’ll either sign up then and there or will be the one they come back to secure, before they leave for good.

Whose job is it anyway: Trade shows are busy places, and if your product packaging needs opening or cooking before presenting – then do you want you or your lead team to be worrying about stock replenishments or bagging up waste; when they should be left free to identify hot prospects and sign them up? As well as attracting delegates to your stand, your follow up process is only as good as the contact data captured. If you don’t have a team who are focussed on that, you’ll end up leaving the show wondering why you’ve given all your products away and got nothing back in return. Event staff cost a fraction of the show cost, but are the most vital aspect of bringing your event to life effectively. Don’t forget to book your support team in advance; and work out who is on catering, who is on pulling people in, who identifies the VIPs – and who is in charge of collecting their contact details. 

2. CONVENIENCE RETAIL AREAS

Photo: Kellogg's Special K Bars were sampled extensively across the UK's busiest train stations and high streets, without any expenditure on site fees.

Urban megacities: During a period high street decline in many city centres, the sector delivering consistent growth is grocery and convenience retail. Tesco Metros and Express, Sainsbury’s Locals, Waitrose, WHSmith, Holland & Barrett, Boots, Plant Organic, etc, etc – are enjoying the boom. The city centres are still packed with hungry people buying breakfasts, lunches and snacks (rather than TVs and handbags). Added to the urban workforce are the city dwellers in their apartment blocks who buy their full weekly shop in these smaller format stores too. The city centre is awash with retailers, transport hubs, office areas, high streets – that can all be used for experiential to suit your stockists and target audience.

Affordable site fees: City centres DO NOT have to mean thousands of pounds spent per day for an over priced and often unnecessary event site inside of a train station concourse or shopping mall. With the right guidance and knowledge of individual councils across the UK, you can save your budget and set up your experiential sampling event sites for as little as nothing – to a few hundred pounds if you want to position something larger like a truck. As long as you work with a specialist who understands the local by-laws, permits and geography, you can create a highly effective tour schedule for your experiential ambitions, for a fraction of what you might imagine.

Daily habits: While consumer events are ideal for a range of reasons (as outlined above), they are not as good as city centres for reaching shoppers who walk past your stockists on a daily basis. For most office workers, they develop habits and patterns that mean they shop in similar stores on a repetitive basis, multiple times per week. The long term value of these customers is gold dust for any brand who can get into their regular buying pattern, using experiential and sampling as the introduction point of your product range and brand.

1. YOUR SUPERMARKET STOCKISTS

Photo: Rustlers toured their pop up burger bar across 180 Tescos, selling up to 559 units per store, per day; growing Tesco's entire ready meal category by 13%.

Success sells: ‘What gets measured gets done’, was the mantra of BodyShop founder Anita Roddick; and when it comes to measuring the effectiveness of your experiential, supermarkets can’t be beaten. Lesser practitioners may propose smoke screen measures such as ‘return on experience’, but when they chips are down – if your activity doesn’t convert purchase, it doesn’t work. No other form of marketing can beat experiential sampling at supermarkets for creating measureable sales uplift. When done right this can be over 10,000% sales growth. For the (gold award winning) brand experiences we create at supermarkets such as Tesco and Asda, it’s normal to take a product that might sell a few units per store per week; and create an uplift of over 500 units per store, per day on the event days. This then translates to long term repeat sales, from all the customers who become your long term brand fans, at each store visited.

Get creative: If you think that experiential at supermarkets means ‘Mable with a table’, you are being poorly advised. It is however a surprising common perception that this is the ‘only’ form of brand activation available in the media agencies of Sainsburys, Asda, Tesco, Waitrose and Morrisons; but it definitely is not. With the right know how, it is both possible and highly effective to create engaging brand experiences, at all of the leading chains of supermarkets. Perhaps surprisingly for some, giants such as Tesco and Asda actually allow full creative control to bring to life your full brand experience to engage with their shoppers, allowing you to get creative with your brand where it matters most.

Long term loyalty: If shoppers don’t know your brand and are not yet familiar with your product, then you need to ask yourself why would they risk buying it? Is a temporary discount your main strategy, that you know won’t stick when it reverts to full RRP in the following week. Effective experiential at supermarkets does more than just present a sample. By showing the real value of your brand and your products to shoppers who purchase in that stockist every week, you can create the kind of loyal brand advocates and sales results that builds your brand’s empire for the future.

For further strategy guidance, experiential activity ideas and scalable campaign plans for 2019 – get in touch at: [email protected]

Joel Kaufman is Managing Director and founder of experiential marketing agency Link Communication. www.linkcommunication.co.uk