Experiential marketing, also known as live marketing or event marketing, is a strategy where consumers are engaged via branded experiences. Experiential marketing is a way for businesses to build brand awareness through face-to-face connections with consumers. Experiential marketing campaigns are immersive, live, and memorable and help businesses attract the attention of their target audience without distraction.
Aspect
Explanation
Definition
Experiential Marketing, also known as engagement marketing or event marketing, is a marketing strategy that focuses on creating immersive and memorable experiences for consumers to engage with a brand or product. It goes beyond traditional advertising methods by allowing consumers to interact with and emotionally connect to a brand through firsthand experiences.
Key Concepts
– Immersive Experiences: Providing consumers with hands-on, memorable experiences related to the brand. – Emotional Engagement: Eliciting strong emotions and connections between consumers and the brand. – Participation: Encouraging active involvement rather than passive observation. – Authenticity: Creating genuine and meaningful experiences that align with the brand’s values. – Memorability: Leaving a lasting impression that consumers will remember and share. – Word-of-Mouth: Encouraging consumers to share their experiences, amplifying brand reach.
Components
Experiential marketing often involves the following components: 1. Events: Hosting live events, pop-up shops, or brand activations. 2. Product Sampling: Allowing consumers to try products before purchase. 3. Interactive Installations: Creating interactive and immersive installations or exhibits. 4. Digital Engagement: Utilizing social media and digital channels to extend the reach of experiences.
Examples
– Red Bull Stratos: Red Bull sponsored Felix Baumgartner’s record-breaking skydive from the stratosphere, creating a memorable and widely shared experience. – Coca-Cola’s Share a Coke: Personalizing Coke cans with names encouraged consumers to find and share their own names. – Nike Run Clubs: Organizing community running events to engage and build a community around the brand. – IKEA Sleepover: IKEA hosted sleepovers in their showrooms for a unique shopping experience.
Benefits
Experiential marketing offers several benefits: 1. Emotional Connection: Creates strong emotional ties to the brand. 2. Memorable Branding: Leaves a lasting impression on consumers. 3. Word-of-Mouth: Encourages consumers to share their experiences, leading to organic promotion. 4. Increased Engagement: Fosters active participation and engagement. 5. Brand Loyalty: Builds brand loyalty among consumers who have positive experiences.
Challenges
Challenges include the high cost of organizing events and experiences, the need for authenticity to avoid backlash, and the difficulty in measuring ROI (Return on Investment) for experiential marketing efforts.
Metrics
Measuring the success of experiential marketing can include metrics such as the number of event attendees, social media engagement, brand mentions, and post-event surveys to gauge consumer sentiment.
Conclusion
Experiential Marketing is a powerful strategy for brands looking to create meaningful connections with consumers. By providing immersive and memorable experiences, brands can tap into consumers’ emotions, foster loyalty, and drive word-of-mouth promotion. However, it requires careful planning, a focus on authenticity, and a willingness to invest in creating unique and engaging experiences. The impact of experiential marketing often extends beyond immediate sales to long-term brand affinity and advocacy.
Table of Contents
Understanding experiential marketing
Note that these campaigns do more than just promote a product or service. Instead, they are designed to encourage customers to actively engage with the core values of a brand.
Compared to traditional marketing strategies, branded events create a much stronger impression in consumers’ minds.
Experiential marketing events may take the form of trade shows, sponsorships, test drives, kiosks, contests, in-store experiences, and in-person surveys.
Some of these events may cater to thousands of people, but each will come away with an experience that is unique to them.
In an age characterized by consumers craving personalized experiences and meaningful interactions before purchasing from a brand, experiential marketing is now seen as a fundamental pillar of any marketingstrategy.
The three key pillars of experiential marketing
To understand experiential marketing, we must first understand the elements that constitute a great branded experience.
Such an experience should always contain the following three pillars.
1 – Active participation and engagement
First and foremost, the consumer must be able to actively engage with a brand. Active engagement may constitute anything from taking a photo and sharing it on social media to participating in a game.
Chocolate brand Milka produced 10 million bars of chocolate with a single piece missing.
The company then set up a website offering confused customers a choice: they could opt to have the missing piece of chocolate posted to them or have it sent to a friend or family member instead.
This campaign gave fans the chance to interact with the company in a meaningful way.
2 – Brand message and values promotion
Experiential marketing should always be about the brand itself. The businesses must allow consumers to experience the brand – simply telling them that the brand is the best is not enough.
Budget airline Scoot set up makeshift change rooms in the middle of Melbourne, a large Australian city with a population of approximately 5 million.
Pedestrians were encouraged to dress in a Grecian toga for their chance to win airline tickets to Athens.
The campaign caused much energy and enthusiasm and allowed Scoot to reinforce its fun, contemporary brand.
3 – Long-lasting value
Experiential marketing should provide long-term value to an audience. Value is facilitated through a memorable brand experience that sticks in the mind of consumers long after the event has taken place.
This allows the company to build authentic, long-term relationships with customers by providing the sort of value it knows customers appreciate.
Experiential marketing examples
For a business to build much deeper connections with its community, a great example of experiential marketing is an event like Salesforce’s Dreamforce.
This is one of the most successful events in the business world, which brings together employees, customers, and the whole community, which works as a catalyst.
The event is so big that when it happens each year, San Francisco’s hotel rooms used to be fully booked.
While Dreamforce is a vast event encompassing thousands of people.
Another great experiential marketing example is small meetups.
Indeed, on a platform like Meetup, you find thousands of small, local events, which can be a great way to build a small, local community.
Another excellent example of experiential marketing is a company like Lush, which uses its stores to have clients feel and experience its products.
For instance, one of the most successful products the company sells is the Bath Bomb, which can be experienced within its stores.
Experiential marketing is critical, especially for digital players, where creating real connections with a community can be much more challenging.
Experiential marketing helps bring this experience into the real-world to create a much deeper connection with your community.
Case Studies
Red Bull Stratos Space Jump: Red Bull sponsored Austrian skydiver Felix Baumgartner’s historic space jump from the stratosphere. The live broadcast of the jump engaged millions of viewers worldwide, showcasing the brand’s association with extreme sports and pushing boundaries.
Nike’s “Breaking2” Marathon Event: Nike organized an immersive marathon event to break the two-hour barrier for a marathon run. They provided live streaming, interactive challenges, and real-time data, creating excitement and engagement around their brand and running products.
Coca-Cola’s “Share a Coke” Campaign: Coca-Cola personalized its soda cans and bottles with individual names, encouraging consumers to find their names or share a Coke with friends. This campaign led to social media buzz, with consumers actively searching for their personalized cans.
IKEA’s Sleepover Experience: IKEA in Australia allowed customers to book a sleepover in their stores. Customers could spend the night testing out IKEA’s beds, creating a unique, hands-on shopping experience.
Heineken’s “Departure Roulette”: Heineken placed a Departure Roulette board at JFK Airport, challenging travelers to change their destinations spontaneously. This campaign created suspense and adventure, associating Heineken with spontaneity and excitement.
Dove’s Real Beauty Sketches: Dove conducted a social experiment where women described themselves to a forensic artist, who then drew their portraits. Later, strangers described the same women, resulting in more flattering portraits. The campaign aimed to boost self-esteem and promote Dove’s brand values.
Google’s “Google Home Mini Donut Shops”: Google set up pop-up donut shops across the U.S., where customers could ask Google Home Mini devices questions to receive a free donut. This campaign showcased the product’s capabilities in a fun and interactive way.
Airbnb’s “Night At” Campaigns: Airbnb offers unique overnight experiences in unconventional places like the Louvre Museum and the Great Wall of China. These campaigns create buzz and engagement by offering once-in-a-lifetime experiences.
Samsung’s “Solve for Tomorrow”: Samsung’s education-focused campaign encourages students to solve real-world problems using STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math). It promotes the brand while supporting education.
Oreo’s “The Great Oreo Cookie Quest”: Oreo created a digital scavenger hunt that combined virtual and real-world experiences. Participants had to find hidden clues and complete challenges using Oreo’s website and physical packages, driving engagement and brand awareness.
Budweiser’s “Whassup?” Reunion: Budweiser brought back its iconic “Whassup?” campaign for a COVID-19 PSA. The reunion video featured the original cast, creating nostalgia and connecting with a new generation.
T-Mobile’s “Taco Tuesday”: T-Mobile partnered with Taco Bell to offer free tacos to customers every Tuesday. This ongoing campaign encourages customer engagement and loyalty.
Key takeaways
Experiential marketing is a way for businesses to build brand awareness through face-to-face connections with consumers.
Experiential marketing events may take the form of trade shows, sponsorships, test drives, kiosks, contests, in-store experiences, and in-person surveys. Some events cater to thousands of people, but each consumer walks away with a unique, personalized experience.
Experiential marketing is based on the three key pillars of a branded experience: active participation and engagement, brand message and values promotion, and long-lasting value.
Key Highlights of Experiential Marketing:
Definition: Experiential marketing, also known as live marketing or event marketing, involves engaging consumers through branded experiences. It’s a strategy that creates face-to-face connections with consumers to build brand awareness and leave a lasting impact.
Immersive and Memorable: Experiential marketing campaigns are designed to be immersive, live, and memorable. They go beyond promoting a product or service; they encourage consumers to actively engage with the core values of a brand.
Effectiveness: Approximately 75% of consumers state that branded event marketing experiences make them more likely to purchase the promoted product. These events create strong impressions in consumers’ minds compared to traditional marketing strategies.
Forms of Experiences: Experiential marketing events can take various forms, including trade shows, sponsorships, test drives, kiosks, contests, in-store experiences, and in-person surveys. Each event aims to provide a unique and personalized experience to consumers.
Key Pillars:
Active Participation and Engagement: Consumers should actively engage with the brand, whether through activities, games, or interactive experiences.
Brand Message and Values Promotion: Experiential marketing should be focused on allowing consumers to experience the brand’s core message and values, creating a deeper connection.
Long-Lasting Value: The experience should provide long-term value to the audience, leaving a memorable impression that continues to resonate.
Examples:
Salesforce’s Dreamforce: An enormous event that brings together employees, customers, and the community, fostering deep connections and community-building.
Local Meetups: Smaller, localized events, often facilitated through platforms like Meetup, to build local communities and connections.
Lush Stores: Lush, a bath and beauty product brand, allows customers to experience its products in-store, creating a sensory and immersive shopping experience.
Digital and Real-World Connection: Experiential marketing is crucial, especially for digital businesses, as it bridges the gap between online and offline interactions, creating deeper connections with communities and customers.
What is an example of experiential marketing?
Experiential marketing is about creating more profound customer experiences so they can connect more deeply with the company and product. A great example is how a cosmetics company, Lush, lets customers experience its Bath Bombs by putting their hands in a bath tab to feel the product and experience it within the store.
Why do brands use experiential marketing?
Brands can use experiential marketing as an extension of their marketing strategy to create a deeper connection with their customers. Experiential marketing makes the company create real-world experiences that can lead to a much deeper connection between the brand and the customer, thus leading to increased customer loyalty, brand recognition, customer retention, and customer referral.
What are the three key elements of experiential marketing?
The three critical elements of experiential marketing are:
Account-based marketing (ABM) is a strategy where the marketing and sales departments come together to create personalized buying experiences for high-value accounts. Account-based marketing is a business-to-business (B2B) approach in which marketing and sales teams work together to target high-value accounts and turn them into customers.
Ad Ops – also known as Digital Ad Operations – refers to systems and processes that support digital advertisements’ delivery and management. The concept describes any process that helps a marketing team manage, run, or optimize ad campaigns, making them an integrating part of the business operations.
Venture capitalist, Dave McClure, coined the acronym AARRR which is a simplified model that enables to understand what metrics and channels to look at, at each stage for the users’ path toward becoming customers and referrers of a brand.
Affinity marketing involves a partnership between two or more businesses to sell more products. Note that this is a mutually beneficial arrangement where one brand can extend its reach and enhance its credibility in association with the other.
As the name suggests, ambush marketing raises awareness for brands at events in a covert and unexpected fashion. Ambush marketing takes many forms, one common element, the brand advertising their products or services has not paid for the right to do so. Thus, the business doing the ambushing attempts to capitalize on the efforts made by the business sponsoring the event.
Affiliate marketing describes the process whereby an affiliate earns a commission for selling the products of another person or company. Here, the affiliate is simply an individual who is motivated to promote a particular product through incentivization. The business whose product is being promoted will gain in terms of sales and marketing from affiliates.
The bullseye framework is a simple method that enables you to prioritize the marketing channels that will make your company gain traction. The main logic of the bullseye framework is to find the marketing channels that work and prioritize them.
Brand building is the set of activities that help companies to build an identity that can be recognized by its audience. Thus, it works as a mechanism of identification through core values that signal trust and that help build long-term relationships between the brand and its key stakeholders.
According to inbound marketing platform HubSpot, brand dilution occurs “when a company’s brand equity diminishes due to an unsuccessful brand extension, which is a new product the company develops in an industry that they don’t have any market share in.” Brand dilution, therefore, occurs when a brand decreases in value after the company releases a product that does not align with its vision, mission, or skillset.
The brand essence wheel is a templated approach businesses can use to better understand their brand. The brand essence wheel has obvious implications for external brand strategy. However, it is equally important in simplifying brand strategy for employees without a strong marketing background. Although many variations of the brand essence wheel exist, a comprehensive wheel incorporates information from five categories: attributes, benefits, values, personality, brand essence.
The brand equity is the premium that a customer is willing to pay for a product that has all the objective characteristics of existing alternatives, thus, making it different in terms of perception. The premium on seemingly equal products and quality is attributable to its brand equity.
Brand positioning is about creating a mental real estate in the mind of the target market. If successful, brand positioning allows a business to gain a competitive advantage. And it also works as a switching cost in favor of the brand. Consumers recognizing a brand might be less prone to switch to another brand.
Business storytelling is a critical part of developing a business model. Indeed, the way you frame the story of your organization will influence its brand in the long-term. That’s because your brand story is tied to your brand identity, and it enables people to identify with a company.
Content marketing is one of the most powerful commercial activities which focuses on leveraging content production (text, audio, video, or other formats) to attract a targeted audience. Content marketing focuses on building a strong brand, but also to convert part of that targeted audience into potential customers.
One of the first mentions of customer lifetime value was in the 1988 book Database Marketing: Strategy and Implementation written by Robert Shaw and Merlin Stone. Customer lifetime value (CLV) represents the value of a customer to a company over a period of time. It represents a critical business metric, especially for SaaS or recurring revenue-based businesses.
Customer segmentation is a marketing method that divides the customers in sub-groups, that share similar characteristics. Thus, product, marketing and engineering teams can center the strategy from go-to-market to product development and communication around each sub-group. Customer segments can be broken down is several ways, such as demographics, geography, psychographics and more.
Developer marketing encompasses tactics designed to grow awareness and adopt software tools, solutions, and SaaS platforms. Developer marketing has become the standard among software companies with a platform component, where developers can build applications on top of the core software or open software. Therefore, engaging developer communities has become a key element of marketing for many digital businesses.
A digital channel is a marketing channel, part of a distribution strategy, helping an organization to reach its potential customers via electronic means. There are several digital marketing channels, usually divided into organic and paid channels. Some organic channels are SEO, SMO, email marketing. And some paid channels comprise SEM, SMM, and display advertising.
Field marketing is a general term that encompasses face-to-face marketing activities carried out in the field. These activities may include street promotions, conferences, sales, and various forms of experiential marketing. Field marketing, therefore, refers to any marketing activity that is performed in the field.
interaction with a brand until they become a paid customer and beyond.
Funnel marketing is modeled after the marketing funnel, a concept that tells the company how it should market to consumers based on their position in the funnel itself. The notion of a customer embarking on a journey when interacting with a brand was first proposed by Elias St. Elmo Lewis in 1898.
Funnel marketing typically considers three stages of a non-linear marketing funnel. These are top of the funnel (TOFU), middle of the funnel (MOFU), and bottom of the funnel (BOFU). Particular marketing strategies at each stage are adapted to the level of familiarity the consumer has with a brand.
A go-to-market strategy represents how companies market their new products to reach target customers in a scalable and repeatable way. It starts with how new products/services get developed to how these organizations target potential customers (via sales and marketing models) to enable their value proposition to be delivered to create a competitive advantage.
The term “greenwashing” was first coined by environmentalist Jay Westerveld in 1986 at a time when most consumers received their news from television, radio, and print media. Some companies took advantage of limited public access to information by portraying themselves as environmental stewards – even when their actions proved otherwise. Greenwashing is a deceptive marketing practice where a company makes unsubstantiated claims about an environmentally-friendly product or service.
Grassroots marketing involves a brand creating highly targeted content for a particular niche or audience. When an organization engages in grassroots marketing, it focuses on a small group of people with the hope that its marketing message is shared with a progressively larger audience.
Growth marketing is a process of rapid experimentation, which in a way has to be “scientific” by keeping in mind that it is used by startups to grow, quickly. Thus, the “scientific” here is not meant in the academic sense. Growth marketing is expected to unlock growth, quickly and with an often limited budget.
Guerrilla marketing is an advertising strategy that seeks to utilize low-cost and sometimes unconventional tactics that are high impact. First coined by Jay Conrad Levinson in his 1984 book of the same title, guerrilla marketing works best on existing customers who are familiar with a brand or product and its particular characteristics.
Hunger marketing is a marketing strategy focused on manipulating consumer emotions. By bringing products to market with an attractive price point and restricted supply, consumers have a stronger desire to make a purchase.
Integrated marketing communication (IMC) is an approach used by businesses to coordinate and brand their communication strategies. Integrated marketing communication takes separate marketing functions and combines them into one, interconnected approach with a core brand message that is consistent across various channels. These encompass owned, earned, and paid media. Integrated marketing communication has been used to great effect by companies such as Snapchat, Snickers, and Domino’s.
Inbound marketing is a marketing strategy designed to attract customers to a brand with content and experiences that they derive value from. Inbound marketing utilizes blogs, events, SEO, and social media to create brand awareness and attract targeted consumers. By attracting or “drawing in” a targeted audience, inbound marketing differs from outbound marketing which actively pushes a brand onto consumers who may have no interest in what is being offered.
Integrated marketing describes the process of delivering consistent and relevant content to a target audience across all marketing channels. It is a cohesive, unified, and immersive marketing strategy that is cost-effective and relies on brand identity and storytelling to amplify the brand to a wider and wider audience.
The marketing mix is a term to describe the multi-faceted approach to a complete and effective marketing plan. Traditionally, this plan included the four Ps of marketing: price, product, promotion, and place. But the exact makeup of a marketing mix has undergone various changes in response to new technologies and ways of thinking. Additions to the four Ps include physical evidence, people, process, and even politics.
Marketing myopia is the nearsighted focus on selling goods and services at the expense of consumer needs. Marketing myopia was coined by Harvard Business School professor Theodore Levitt in 1960. Originally, Levitt described the concept in the context of organizations in high-growth industries that become complacent in their belief that such industries never fail.
Marketing personas give businesses a general overview of key segments of their target audience and how these segments interact with their brand. Marketing personas are based on the data of an ideal, fictional customer whose characteristics, needs, and motivations are representative of a broader market segment.
Meme marketing is any marketing strategy that uses memes to promote a brand. The term “meme” itself was popularized by author Richard Dawkins over 50 years later in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. In the book, Dawkins described how ideas evolved and were shared across different cultures. The internet has enabled this exchange to occur at an exponential rate, with the first modern memes emerging in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Microtargeting is a marketing strategy that utilizes consumer demographic data to identify the interests of a very specific group of individuals. Like most marketing strategies, the goal of microtargeting is to positively influence consumer behavior.
Multichannel marketing executes a marketing strategy across multiple platforms to reach as many consumers as possible. Here, a platform may refer to product packaging, word-of-mouth advertising, mobile apps, email, websites, or promotional events, and all the other channels that can help amplify the brand to reach as many consumers as possible.
Multi-level marketing (MLM), otherwise known as network or referral marketing, is a strategy in which businesses sell their products through person-to-person sales. When consumers join MLM programs, they act as distributors. Distributors make money by selling the product directly to other consumers. They earn a small percentage of sales from those that they recruit to do the same – often referred to as their “downline”.
The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a measure of the ability of a product or service to attract word-of-mouth advertising. NPS is a crucial part of any marketing strategy since attracting and then retaining customers means they are more likely to recommend a business to others.
Neuromarketing information is collected by measuring brain activity related to specific brain functions using sophisticated and expensive technology such as MRI machines. Some businesses also choose to make inferences of neurological responses by analyzing biometric and heart-rate data.
Neuromarketing is the domain of large companies with similarly large budgets or subsidies. These include Frito-Lay, Google, and The Weather Channel.
Newsjacking as a marketing strategy was popularised by David Meerman Scott in his book Newsjacking: How to Inject Your Ideas into a Breaking News Story and Generate Tons of Media Coverage. Newsjacking describes the practice of aligning a brand with a current event to generate media attention and increase brand exposure.
A microniche is a subset of potential customers within a niche. In the era of dominating digital super-platforms, identifying a microniche can kick off the strategy of digital businesses to prevent competition against large platforms. As the microniche becomes a niche, then a market, scale becomes an option.
We can define pull and push marketing from the perspective of the target audience or customers. In push marketing, as the name suggests, you’re promoting a product so that consumers can see it. In a pull strategy, consumers might look for your product or service drawn by its brand.
Real-time marketing is as exactly as it sounds. It involves in-the-moment marketing to customers across any channel based on how that customer is interacting with the brand.
Relationship marketing involves businesses and their brands forming long-term relationships with customers. The focus of relationship marketing is to increase customer loyalty and engagement through high-quality products and services. It differs from short-term processes focused solely on customer acquisition and individual sales.
Reverse marketing describes any marketing strategy that encourages consumers to seek out a product or company on their own. This approach differs from a traditional marketing strategy where marketers seek out the consumer.
Remarketing involves the creation of personalized and targeted ads for consumers who have already visited a company’s website. The process works in this way: as users visit a brand’s website, they are tagged with cookies that follow the users, and as they land on advertising platforms where retargeting is an option (like social media platforms) they get served ads based on their navigation.
Sensory marketing describes any marketing campaign designed to appeal to the five human senses of touch, taste, smell, sight, and sound. Technologies such as artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and the Internet of Things (IoT) are enabling marketers to design fun, interactive, and immersive sensory marketing brand experiences. Long term, businesses must develop sensory marketing campaigns that are relevant and effective in eCommerce.
Services marketing originated as a separate field of study during the 1980s. Researchers realized that the unique characteristics of services required different marketing strategies to those used in the promotion of physical goods. Services marketing is a specialized branch of marketing that promotes the intangible benefits delivered by a company to create customer value.
Sustainable marketing describes how a business will invest in social and environmental initiatives as part of its marketing strategy. Also known as green marketing, it is often used to counteract public criticism around wastage, misleading advertising, and poor quality or unsafe products.
Word-of-mouth marketing is a marketing strategy skewed toward offering a great experience to existing customers and incentivizing them to share it with other potential customers. That is one of the most effective forms of marketing as it enables a company to gain traction based on existing customers’ referrals. When repeat customers become a key enabler for the brand this is one of the best organic and sustainable growth marketing strategies.
360 marketing is a marketing campaign that utilizes all available mediums, channels, and consumer touchpoints. 360 marketing requires the business to maintain a consistent presence across multiple online and offline channels. This ensures it does not miss potentially lucrative customer segments. By its very nature, 360 marketing describes any number of different marketing strategies. However, a broad and holistic marketing strategy should incorporate a website, SEO, PPC, email marketing, social media, public relations, in-store relations, and traditional forms of advertising such as television.
Gennaro is the creator of FourWeekMBA, which reached about four million business people, comprising C-level executives, investors, analysts, product managers, and aspiring digital entrepreneurs in 2022 alone | He is also Director of Sales for a high-tech scaleup in the AI Industry | In 2012, Gennaro earned an International MBA with emphasis on Corporate Finance and Business Strategy.
