Experiential Marketing

Case Studies in Customer Experience

Wided Batat

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000297973
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Marketing
• Index: Marketing

Experiential marketing has become an indispensable tool for all types of businesses across multiple sectors. This book provides an all-encompassing, practical, and conceptual map of contemporary experiential case studies, which together offer insights into this exciting approach to customer experience.

Experiential Marketing incorporates 36 international case studies from 12 key sectors, from technology, consumer goods, and B2B to luxury, events, and tourism sectors. With a selection of case studies from leading brands, such as Coca-Cola, Nutella, Chanel, NASA, The New York Times, Pfizer, and Amtrak, the reader will learn and practice the experiential marketing tools and strategies through these examples. Expert testimonials, practical applied exercises, and the author's online videos provide both theoretical foundations and concrete application.

This is a must-read for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate Marketing and Customer Experience students and an excellent teaching resource. It should also be of great use to practitioners – particularly those studying for professional qualifications – who are interested in learning experiential marketing strategies and developing knowledge about the way big brands in different sectors are designing the customer experience online and offline.

Online material includes lecture slides, a test bank of questions, an instructor's manual, and explanatory videos.

1Customer experience in the technology sector

Among many other features, digital firms such as Google, Amazon, Uber, or Netflix have transformed the customer experience in less than ten years. By using data and smartphones with user-friendly and highly personalized interfaces, digital firms are becoming the top leading pure players when it comes to consumer-centricity to advance the customer experience. Furthermore, these digital companies are becoming the legitimate role models followed by various market actors in different sectors (e.g., hotels, airlines, restaurants, and higher education) to implement an effective and profitable customer experience centered on the consumer. The companies are doing so by building their platforms and developing the tools that allow them to stay ahead of their competitors and become digital experience providers themselves. In this chapter, three company cases are introduced. These examine the major digital firms that effectively and creatively implement an experiential strategy, namely, GAFA, Netflix, and Uber. I first explore the story and the marketing strategy of each company. I then focus on the customer experience implementation process and the use of digital tools in each company. Finally, I summarize the future challenges for these firms to reinvent and elevate the digital experience by leveraging data and privacy.

Learning outcomes

After exploring and solving the questions for practice and the challenges presented at the end of this chapter, you will be able to develop a way to think critically about how firms in the technology sector are adopting and implementing customer experience strategies and the main challenges they are facing. Also, in the online video provided, “Introducing concepts & tools,” you will learn more about the experiential marketing mix tools and how digital companies can use them to design the ultimate customer experience, both online and offline, in a way that fits with the functional, social, and emotional needs of their customers and thus elevates the digital experience.

Company case 1: The GAFA – how the Big Four digital firms are leveraging digital and data to enhance the customer experience

Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon (GAFA) have become the undeniable powers of e-commerce in less than 20 years. In 2014, their cumulative turnover was $350 billion, equivalent to the gross domestic product of Denmark. In this context, the temptation is great for online merchants to seize the “Big Four” economic model and to bet their digital strategies on the reputation of the tools developed by these four giants. The GAFA have imposed new standards by establishing a correlation between the quality that customers experience and their loyalty. Each of these Big Four companies has a specific story and a relevant marketing strategy centered on the customer/user experience that explains the success behind the rise of the GAFA.

Google

How did it all start? The story behind Google’s successful marketing strategy

Google first began when Sergey Brin and Larry Page, roommates and PhD students at Stanford University, came up with a search engine called BackRub. BackRub used an innovative algorithm to display search results called PageRank. It ranked web pages according to how many other relevant pages were linked to them.

Hence, the search results were more consistent and accurate than any other search engine at the time. At some point, the two founders realized that they needed a friendlier name for their website. They used the word googol, which indicated the number one with a hundred zeros after it and tweaked it around to become Google. They also used their dorm room as Google’s offices until Stanford’s IT department kicked them out because they were using too much bandwidth. Then, the two founders moved the company to a garage and secured a $100,000 investment. The timeline of their success is as follows:

•In 1999, Brin and Page moved to their first real office, which was next to PayPal and then raised $25 million in venture capital funding. This stage marked the actual start of Google as we know it today. Google today targets all Internet users. It has over 8 billion customers worldwide; 60 percent of all Internet searches are done with Google. This picture brings us to the money-making aspect of the company: advertisements. The company offered its most popular product for free (the search engine) and created a business model that generates money from ads that pop up while people are using it. The strategy has been a massive success because the ads are targeted at specific demographics. Each user receives advertisements that fit his/her age, nationality, gender, and interests, among other, more complicated parameters. What’s noteworthy about Google’s customers is that most of them are under the age of 35, and 55 percent are male. Most are upper-middle-class, have a high degree of technological knowledge, and are business professionals. In the first quarter of 2018, $26.6 billion of the company’s $31.1 billion in revenue came from advertising.

•In 2006, Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion. They have similar platforms in terms of their searches and ad targeting. In 2008, Google released its first Android-based phone. This purchase was a significant step in the company’s product offerings. The phone eventually turned out to be very successful and became Apple OS’s main competitor. Google is also one of the key players in the cloud market next to Amazon and Microsoft. Besides, Google has a diverse portfolio of other products like News, Analytics, Translate, Suit, Chrome, driverless cars, Wallet, and Chromebook, among other things. The company evolved from being a search engine with a unique algorithm to becoming one of the world leaders in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. Google spends 15 percent of its total sales on research and development (R&D). Since 2012, the company has been acquiring smaller firms that specialize in AI and is focusing primarily on neural networks, a type of machine learning modeled after the human brain.

•In 2015, Alphabet Inc. was created as part of the restructuring and became Google’s parent company. Today, Alphabet is the world’s fourth-largest technology company. Its rapid and constant growth is primarily due to continuous innovation. The founders are continuously expanding and investing in a broad spectrum of technological advancements.

Google’s advertising strategy differs from other online platforms because it is by itself an advertising and marketing tool. It does not need to advertise its products. It gathers data about users and uses it to sell targeted ads for a hefty price.

Google Marketing Platform is what businesses use to let people know about their products and services. The companies gather information from our search histories and the websites we visit and use these insights to select the ads that show up on our screen. Let’s say you are looking to buy a new car and search for used car dealerships using Google. Then you visit car-related websites. After you do that, you immediately notice that many ads that show up while you are browsing online are car-related and of particular interest to you.

How much does Google know about us? This is clearly stated in its privacy policy, I will list a few of them here:

•Name

•Gender

•Birthday

•Cellphone numbers

•Google searches

•Visited websites

•Exact location

•Favorite type of music

•Audio equipment we use

•Favorite restaurants

•Where we work

•Where we live

•What we watch on YouTube

After a careful reading of Alphabet’s 10K report, we can extract some advertisement-related strategies and goals. The report states that the business’s primary goal is to deliver the right advertisement at the right time for maximum user engagement. Google calls this performance advertising. It provides ads on all available interfaces and in different formats.

The success of a campaign using Google products is measurable. It is based on the number of clicks that lead consumers to engage with advertisers directly. This performance-based method ensures that the business’s advertising done with Google results in fees based on the engagement numbers.

Another essential concept mentioned in the report is brand advertising. Google uses all the available resources to enhance a user’s affinity to an advertiser’s products. It deploys tools such as videos, images, and interactive ads. The aim is to create deep partnerships between advertisers, users, and themselves using a world-class technology platform, allowing measurable results. Google’s main competitors are now reproducing this adaptive advertisement model, but their traffic will enable them to have the most massive data amounts, allowing for more targeted and efficient campaigns.

Google’s quest for a relevant digital experience to drive revenue

The Internet has come a long way since the creation of the World Wide Web in 1991, with Google becoming the leader in this field. Its primary goal is to serve the needs of Internet users, and it has been doing a great job. The company positioned itself to beat its competitors by creating the best user-friendly search engine available. It then augmented its product offering to complement its search engine and reach the widest audience possible. Today, few of us can go for a day without using one of Google’s products. We have become so dependent on them that we cannot even imagine our lives without them – thanks to Google’s user-centricity and the relevant digital experience it creates by incorporating multiple touchpoints.

Google’s consumer-centricity and Internet user experience touchpoints

The way data is transferred from one application to another to create the ultimate user experience is extraordinary. For example, location data gathered from maps analyzes what kind of restaurants we frequently visit and uses this data to suggest similar culinary experiences nearby using ads or the search results in one’s browser. The average human cannot use a mobile phone that doesn’t support Google products. Our contacts, GPS, emails, calendars, searches, cloud storage, phone’s operating system, and apps are all linked to Google directly or indirectly.

Google set up a guide based on five fundamental principles shaping the digital transformation, which are called the five As:

1.Audience: Based on compiling online data, centralizing, and evaluating it to form a strategy to identify and engage the right people.

2.Assets: The production of relevant, context-sensitive ads using acquired insights from user data gathered in a fast and straightforward way to create a rich user experience.

3.Access: With reach as a primary target, the use of cost-effective tools to manage contact frequency without jeopardizing transparency and brand safety standards.

4.Attribution: Models that account for the dynamics between channels and devices to eliminate errors attributed to the last-click model, which considers that the last-click is the interaction that made the user commit to the purchase. Attribution is about measuring the value of each point of contact.

5.Automation: Simplifying and improving performance using machine learning to reduce costs and create a consistent user experience that is fast and efficient.

Google’s current primary focus is gathering information from all the free products to present relevant and useful ads, which eventually generate profits and improve the user’s experience. This model is now being adapted and used by many online providers, which use free products to gather data to enhance the online experience.

Over time, the Internet’s use has become all about efficiency and the intelligent use of data. A process that used to take 30 minutes online is now doable in 30 seconds, and the flow of data has been adapted using machine learning to make things as simple as possible. Today, Internet users rarely receive irrelevant information or random ads that pop up unexpectedly and trivially.

For Google, the experience touchpoint is the user’s interaction with a specific product, whether through an ad, a blog post, a click on an ad, a website visit, or the purchase itself. Google can record up to 5,000 interactions per conversion path.

There are three essential types of communications: the first are related to interactions based on position. Interactions based on a location can be subcategorized into three parts: first interaction, middle interaction, and last interaction (or first touch, middle touch, and final touch). The second are related to the type, such as click interactions, impression interactions, and direct visit interactions. And, lastly, interactions based on campaign or traffic-source type, such as a keyword interaction, campaign interaction, Facebook interaction, and many more. An assist interaction is any interaction other than the last interaction.

Google Analytics consists of two types of analysis:

1.assisting interaction analysis, which handles the interactions other...