Experiential Marketing

Secrets, Strategies, and Success Stories from the World's Greatest Brands

Kerry Smith, Dan Hanover

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781119145899
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Marketing
• Index: Business

The most researched, documented, and comprehensive manifesto on experiential marketing.

As customers take control over what, when, why, and how they buy products and services, brands face the complete breakdown and utter failure of passive marketing strategies designed more than a half-century ago. To connect with a new generation of customers, companies must embrace and deploy a new marketing mix, powered by a more effective discipline: experiences.

Experiential marketing, the use of live, face-to-face engagements to connect with audiences, create relationships and drive brand affinity, has become the fastest-growing form of marketing in the world as the very companies that built their brands on the old Madison Avenue approach—including Coca-Cola, Nike, Microsoft, American Express and others—open the next chapter of marketing... as experiential brands.

Using hundreds of case studies, exclusive research, and interviews with more than 150 global brands spanning a decade, global experiential marketing experts Kerry Smith and Dan Hanover present the most in-depth book ever written on how companies are using experiences as the anchor of reinvented marketing mixes.

You'll learn:

• The history and fundamental principles of experiential marketing
• How top brands have reset marketing mixes as experience-driven portfolios
• The anatomy of a brand experience
• The psychology of engagement and experience design
• The 10 habits of highly experiential brands
• How to measure the impact of experiential marketing
• How to combine digital and social media in an experiential strategy
• The experiential marketing vocabulary
• How to begin converting to experiential marketing

Marketers still torn between outdated marketing models and the need to reinvent how they market in today's customer-controlled economy will find the clarity they need to refine their marketing strategies, get a roadmap for putting their brands on a winning path, and walk away inspired to transition into experiential brands.

Chapter One The Rise of the Experience

Humans are social animals.

The need to gather and share stories dates back to the dawn of man, when our ancestors met around the fire to share in the kill and documented hunts on cave walls. Over thousands of years of political and social upheaval, natural and man-made disasters, and technological achievements that have shaped and reshaped our world, the need to share has remained constant—and it defines us as a species. But while our need to share stories has not changed over the millennia, the methods by which we share them have.

As a marketer, the need to cut through noise and tell your story has never been more important—or more difficult. In today’s tune-out culture, where the interruptive marketing strategies of yesterday have been rendered almost useless by consumers who can now tune you out, brands need more than a catchy jingle, an amusing TV spot, or a big budget to be noticed. Being flashy, sexy, or loud no longer equates to a return on investment. Marketers have no one to blame but themselves for their current predicament. For decades, brands worshipped at the altar of mass reach—using GRPs, CPMs, and other quantitative metrics for delivering the most messages at the least cost, and in the process bombarding consumers with irrelevant messages at the wrong time. That approach doesn’t create engagement; it creates exasperation. It’s no wonder that, when given the opportunity to skip or block mass media, consumers do it in droves. And if traditional media clutter isn’t challenging enough, today’s customers are bypassing established media altogether and consuming content, sharing, and communicating via entirely new social and mobile platforms . . . which make them even harder to reach.

Brands have two choices: (1) continue to play cat-and-mouse with customers, trying to keep up with where they’re going and adapting messaging to the medium du jour. We call this the “push” option, which requires you spend money to chase your consumers to their next favorite medium and then figure out how to interrupt them with your message. Or (2) take another path—one that taps into the core of our human DNA and virtually forces target audiences to stop, take notice, and participate. We call this the “pull” approach, and it is the central tenet of experiential marketing, a powerful strategy used more and more by leading brands to create true customer engagement that delivers measurable results.

In its simplest form, experiential marketing is nothing more than a highly evolved form of corporate storytelling. But while the premise appears simple—combine a brand message, elements of interactivity, a targeted audience, and deliver it in a live setting to create a defined outcome—successful experiences are both art and science. Embracing experiential marketing requires a new way of thinking about marketing, creativity, and the role of media in the overall mix.

This may sound a bit uncomfortable for many marketers, because it requires changing some very established ways of thinking and branding methods. But those who have transitioned to an experiential marketing mindset are finding that any pains of change are outweighed by the benefits of more powerful marketing, more engaged customers, and better returns on marketing investments.

This book is the culmination of more than a decade spent working with some of the biggest brands in the world, interviewing hundreds of marketers, and documenting thousands of experiential marketing programs. Throughout our years covering the leaders of the experiential marketing movement, we’ve isolated and identified key success factors that successful experience brands share. None began their journeys as highly evolved experiential marketers, but many can now claim expert status after years of trial and error. We are about to provide you with the collective insights and wisdom from the marketers who blazed the trail so you can proceed down this exciting new path.

The Experience R/Evolution

There are four general pillars of all stories: The story, the storyteller, the medium by which the story is shared, and the listener. Eliminate any one of these and it’s quite literally end-of-story.

Commercial storytelling took shape in the late 18th century as manufacturers shifted their focus from simply announcing the existence of their goods and services to using words and images that would persuade customers to buy theirs. Four factors ignited this movement toward “show and sell” corporate storytelling:

• The industrial revolution, which allowed manufacturers to generate products in mass quantities (and created pressure to stimulate mass consumption)
• An expanding transportation network that could take products to distant markets efficiently
• A growing media and retail infrastructure that could reach customers in virtually every market
• An exploding population with a voracious appetite for goods and services

Modern print advertising took off in the 1920s. Then radio lifted commercial messages off of printed pages and broadcast them into millions of living rooms. And newspapers began to work with “agencies” that called on companies to handle the process of selling, producing, and billing their ads. Over time, these agencies began understanding what made some ads more effective than others. They became advertising agencies.

After radio, of course, came television. It combined visuals with sound, and modern consumer marketing was born. But somewhere along the way, perhaps distracted by the glitz and glamour of Madison Avenue, brands lost sight of something fundamentally important. Marketing had become less about the story and the listener and all about the storyteller and the medium. Companies outbid each other for primetime placement of messages; they bought print ads via computer programs based on demographics; they escalated the arms race of spending in order to proclaim dominance; and they became servants to the media that carried their messages. (Years ago we asked a creative director at one of the biggest ad agencies whether he ever saw a marketing challenge that couldn’t be solved with a 30-second TV spot. He couldn’t think of one.)

It was a time when the loudest voice garnered the biggest market share. And bigger budgets begat louder voices. But economic turmoil has a way of shaking up the status quo. The first real crack in the wall happened during the Savings and Loan Crisis in 1989, which put the country into an 18-month-long recession that ended in March 1991. The tumult jolted marketers into trying to find ways to boost sales, and it was during this period that it became clear that the two beliefs upon which marketing was based—that if people are aware they will buy and that the definition of success is reaching the most people—were both false.

This coincided with the collapse of the Soviet Union during the same year when, less than a month after Lenin’s statue was pulled down, a regional root beer brand in New Orleans with a miniscule marketing budget was looking for a way to boost sales over the summer. Barq’s announced it was having a “Soviet Union Going Out of Business Sale.” The brand dispatched one of its marketers to Russia with $70,000 in his pocket, which he used to fill a shipping container with two tons of Metrushka dolls, Lenin Day pins, tank commander watches, and military medals, all of which were to be offered in a promotion that gave consumers a Soviet tchotchke in exchange for proof-of-purchase from a 12-pack of Barq’s root beer. It ignited the age of promotion marketing. The creative stunt received worldwide press, nearly 100 percent bottler participation, and a 30 percent bump in sales (the brand was ultimately acquired by The Coca-Cola Co.). The thinking of the day was that advertising could change people’s minds, but promotion could change their behavior.

For a decade after Barq’s reminded marketers that a great story could trump a big budget, this type of promotion marketing thrived as marketers discovered that combining compelling stories with purchase incentives could help gain distribution, sell product, and combat competitive activity. During this time, the ad agency conglomerates shifted from buying each other in the mid-1980s to buying promotion agencies in the mid-1990s, combining their core creative and media buying capabilities with so-called “below-the-line” promotion services to offer clients a full suite of marketing support.

Supporting the rise of promotion marketing was a study issued at the time by an industry trade group representing retail display manufacturers that found two-thirds of all purchasing decisions were made in the store. So for all the money that marketers had been pouring into traditional advertising, consumers were making their purchase decisions within feet of checkout lanes. The findings provided support for those who were espousing the benefits of combining a brand message with an incentive to drive action and building a compelling story around the effort to create excitement.

It was the first step in the experiential marketing movement.

The marketing mix continued to expand. Advertising and promotion were joined by in-store marketing, direct marketing, and later online marketing. At most companies, each “marketing silo,” as they were called, was developed on its own and operated independently. As a result, the marketing mix evolved as pieces, not as a collective, which is why until the mid-1990s, marketing portfolios were largely a collection of separate tools, rather than parts of a single engine that worked together. Each was funded independently and often managed by dedicated teams—the direct marketing department, the online marketing team, the advertising group, and so on. They each had independent goals, different brand standards, even different compensation incentives that varied from group to group. In some cases, the different teams worked together on campaigns—most times they did not. The lack of internal coordination or strategy for integrating marketing or at least aligning around common business goals created turf battles, conflicting messaging, and enough other inefficiencies and confusion to mask the weaknesses of current marketing and the larger potential of using an experiential strategy. (Many companies today are still set up this way, but their numbers are dwindling as financial pressures have forced marketing departments to operate more efficiently.)

Throughout it all, marketers had been dabbling “off the grid” with something called “branded events.”

• The Pepsi Challenge served blind sips of soda to consumers and essentially turned millions of consumers into an army of branded spokespeople.
• Toy giant Saban launched a weekend Power Rangers family tour that turned 31 Walmarts into kid-friendly festivals. More than 4,000 fans attended each—sales increased by 400 percent.
• American Express staged a free Sheryl Crow concert in New York City’s Central Park to promote a new Blue credit card aimed at younger shoppers. The event aired via the first-ever national “trimulcast” on Fox TV stations, 60 radio stations, and blueconcerts.com. A “Blue Crew” distributed 25,000 concert tickets around New York City to drive card applications. The number of cards in force exceeded goals by 71 percent and applications by 150 percent.
• To increase sales of its Tamiflu medication, Roche sent glass-enclosed (“germ-free”) residences built on the backs of flatbed trucks into 70 cities. Each was home to an actor conducting his daily activities (sleeping, eating, working on the computer), seemingly oblivious to the commotion he caused outside his walls. The punch line was displayed on all sides of the vehicles: “One person in this town who can probably feel safe from the flu. For the rest of us flu sufferers, there’s Tamiflu.” Tamiflu outsold its competitor by a three-to-one margin and gained a 58 percent share of market.

But as successful as these campaigns were, most suffered from a lack of support, funding, and understanding—the programs were considered one-shots . . . or advertising spinoffs, as many called them. Brave marketers continued to experiment with live events to reach and engage customers who were becoming increasingly difficult to reach using traditional methods. Incremental successes bred repeated programs and a growing legion of live marketing believers. Yet marketers were telling us that without credible information—best practices, case studies, research—they were having a difficult time convincing management to approve “real” expenditures on larger-scale experiential initiatives.

Our own journey began around that time. We noticed an incredible number of major brands moving marketing budgets out of traditional media and redeploying them into face-to-face channels where they could get closer to their customers in the hopes of boosting sales. Our friends Joe Pine and Jim Gilmore were about to publish The Experience Economy (1999), in which they predicted that future economic growth lay in the value of experiences. Touting the merits of goods...