Experiential Marketing

A Practical Guide to Interactive Brand Experiences

Shirra Smilansky

• Verlag: Kogan Page
• Jahr: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780749480974
• Auflage: 2
• Thema: Business
• Thema: Marketing

The immersive brand experience is revolutionizing brand engagement. Experiential Marketing, second edition, cuts through the jargon with clear practical guidelines on how to magnify marketing strategies to a powerful new level. This book emphasizes that experiential marketing is not just about creating a live event. A unique, immersive experience allows businesses to generate a surge of brand engagement, which is amplified immediately by a niche target of consumers through live content sharing and social media streams. This comprehensive second edition of Experiential Marketing pinpoints exactly where this innovative strategy fits in with the current marketing and events climate, including a step-by-step outline to plan, integrate and evaluate its game-changing results. The completely fresh content analyzes the latest industry advances and case studies, including four new chapters on the digital experience and merged realities, plus the experience economy and creative explosion of the 'Pop-Up' phenomenon. Accompanied with a digital toolkit of downloadable resources, this book is essential reading for marketing, business, media and events professionals alike, providing strategic decision makers with a unique competitive advantage in a vibrant new era of marketing strategy.

PART ONE

An experiential revolution

The accelerating transformation of business and marketing

01

What is experiential marketing?

Experiential marketing is a methodology, not a channel

Marketing communication messages, through media or other marketing channels, exist to communicate with different consumer groups or business sectors. Marketing communication channels traditionally include: advertising, direct mail, packaging, sales promotion, sponsorship, public relations, digital and live brand experiences. These have all seen rapid transformation as technology accelerates change in the creative industries and ‘Next Gen-ers’ (a mix of millennials and Gen Z) grow up to represent enormous chunks of society’s purchasing consumers and influencers.

Integrating your live brand experience

Live brand experiences should not be created in isolation without consideration for how they and their content will translate through other channels. It is always best to explore how to replicate them digitally and integrate them with the rest of your marketing efforts, utilizing and considering the formats of a selection of your available channels to help support its effectiveness. Marketers deploy each channel to achieve different goals and objectives, and each platform has different considerations in terms of how to best produce appropriate content and personalized creative.

Advertising: raising awareness of a live brand experience

Within an integrated experiential marketing strategy, advertising is usually implemented to create or raise brand awareness of a live brand experience.

What is experiential marketing?

Experiential marketing is the process of identifying and satisfying customer needs and aspirations profitably, engaging them through authentic twoway communications that bring brand personalities to life and add value to the Target Audience.

An integrated experiential checklist:

1. Experiential marketing is an integrated methodology; always engaging Target Audiences at their will through authentic brand-relevant communications that add value.
2. An experiential marketing campaign is built around one big idea that should involve a Two-Way Interaction between the brand and the Target Audience in real time, therefore featuring a live brand experience at its core.
3. The ‘other’ marketing communications channels and social media platforms that are selected and integrated are known as the ‘amplification channels’, which amplify the impact of the big idea (the live brand experience and its content, through seamless and authentic storytelling).

Experiential marketing is a methodology. It is a customer-centric approach to effectively communicating with your Target Audiences. ‘Experience Brands’ are those that embrace the customer experience wholly, gaining significant competitive advantage by deploying this Two-Way Interaction- focused, experience-oriented strategy across everything they do in an authentic and real way that has relevance to their audiences.

The growth of experiential marketing

Experiential marketing spend often comes from other allocated budgets such as the PR, events or below-the-line budget, or the sales promotion budget. Increasingly, many decision makers are realizing that experiential marketing is an integrated methodology to marketing communications and offers considerable advantages when combined with social media and PR, compared to advertising.

Interview excerpt: creating impact through experiential marketing

Barbara Bahns, Head of Regional Marketing Planning and Communications CEE, Visa Inc

Whereas 15 years ago marketers would still go for a high-reach above-the-line campaign, and some of them still do, obviously, that doesn’t create brand engagement any more, not on the scale that it did maybe 20 years ago, for example, when advertising on TV was fairly new and was kind of exciting. It’s not that exciting any more, is it?! Now the TV spots that you remember are the TV spots from the 1990s, because it was new, and it was new storytelling.

Experiential marketing on the whole is opening up – well it is actually allowing me as a marketeer to be able to talk to my audience and to drive impact with them, something that is increasingly difficult if not nearly impossible with an above-the-line.⁴

Increasing budgets

Budgets are increasingly moving towards experiential marketing initiatives and plans. Many marketers are therefore moving significant portions of budget to experiential marketing, in favour of ‘above the line/advertising’-led approaches. They find experiential marketing to be especially useful in achieving objectives that the others find hard to accomplish, such as creating brand advocacy, encouraging word of mouth and bringing the Brand Personality to life through multisensory expressions that lead to long-lasting memories and a deep emotional connection, as explored throughout the BETTER chapter of the book (Chapter 6).

The investment in experiential marketing by brands has risen again according to the 2017 Bellwether Report from the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA).⁵ The figures again reveal experiential marketing to be outpacing other disciplines in terms of brand spending. Live brand experiences (classified as event marketing) were predicted to see the greatest increase against other disciplines.

Focus on measurement

Measurement is a high priority to justify increased investment in experiential. However, a lack of suitable and consistent methods for evaluating experiential marketing has been a major criticism faced by the industry. This means experiential marketing is often measured using similar metrics to traditional marketing and advertising (such as opportunity to see) – methods that are far from suitable in measuring the success of the campaigns. If you consider that the value of a truly engaged consumer – who has been educated and immersed in a brand and what it stands for – is far greater than one who merely ‘was exposed to the brand’, then you realize how inaccurate it is to quantify the value of the reach in the same way.

Experiential future

At first glance, and after failing to impress in the respect of huge numbers, some people perceive experiential marketing as a limited tactical tool, rather than as a key strategic approach that marketers should consider central to their integrated marketing communications plan. In fact, word-of-mouth reach and brand advocacy are so valuable – and can expand the brand’s reach to such a massive scale – that if experiential marketing were to be measured according to its unique benefits, marketers would find that it is hugely successful in impacting unprecedented numbers of people. As with all marketing, this is not always the case if only last-minute tactical activities are implemented. To gain maximum benefits, customer experience and experiential marketing should be central to the long-term marketing strategy of any brand.

Traditional channels aim to increase brand awareness, market share and sales. Experiential marketing can achieve these objectives, but the live brand experience must be at the core of the integrated marketing communications strategy in order to gain maximum results. Experiential marketing brings a great deal more than brand awareness or a quick sale from a promiscuous customer. To gain maximum...