What art thou experiential marketing?

Experiential marketing has been dismissed by some as merely product promotion with entertainment thrown on top. But it's a great deal more than that - and considerably more valuable...

By Jennifer Kirkby, consulting editor

As customer experience managers march into position, poking at processes, tracking down touchpoints and kicking-off feedback systems, in another part of the ‘enterprise’ a particularly efficacious ‘brand building’ technique is simultaneously springing to life. This technique points the way to the future of engaging customers with better experiences - yet it is doubtful whether many customer experience managers even know about it. The technique is experiential marketing.

Experiential marketing (EM) is a hybrid of field marketing (FM) shop floor product promotion techniques, eg sampling, merchandising and point of sale offers. Only the objective of experiential marketing is not to just sell more product, but to engage a target audience with the ‘personality’ of the brand through experiencing it.

Examples of experiential marketing include:

• Strongbow cider wanted to challenge negative perception of its brand and engage more 18–30 year olds. So it held ‘in the know’ music events at music festivals with cult DJs and forged media partnerships with relevant ‘hip’ music magazines. All of which gave it more credibility when talking with their target customers.

• Umbro, the sports supplier, wanted to demonstrate its love of football. So it set out to capture with photography the passion individual people had for the sport around the world. It then put on an emotive touring photographic exhibition; all tied into the world cup.

• Dove body products has its long running campaign for real beauty – challenging the stereotypical model of female beauty. This has included building an online sharing community, emotive photography, brand space road show, in store sampling and using real women in its advertising.

A growing interest

The idea behind EM is to bring the brand ‘face to face’ with customers to demonstrate brand values and build customer expectation – it is this face to face demonstration that makes it a child of FM. EM techniques strive to forge deeper emotional connection with targeted groups and individuals by using multi-sensory stimulation. They include events, product placement, brand spaces, education classes and ultimately opportunities for customer co-creating. This is where it points the way to the future of customer experience.

What EM is not, and has been much mistaken for, is product promotion with entertainment thrown on top. Dressing sampling staff up as drag queens to sell more bleach, as one company did, is amplified product promotion, it is not experiential marketing, ie demonstrating brand values!!

EM is growing in popularity as results in terms of effective brand (relationship) building are deemed to be longer lasting than FM’s short-term product lift. Both are increasingly seen as more effective than advertising. This is quite a reversal of fortune; for many years FM was viewed as price discounting and played a distinct second fiddle to advertising. Now EM and FM together are set to becoming one of the fastest growing marketing communications areas, charged with bringing advertising to life with real experiences – brand actualising in the jargon.

A 2006 European research study by international marketing services company MICE found that an increasing number of marketing communication budgets were shifting spend towards experiential marketing. It forecast that over the next five years this will become the biggest growth area for marketing communication budgets - a finding corroborated by other marketing spend surveys.

The reasons given for this growing interest in EM are:

• The ability of face to face to improve sales and create an emotional experience.
• Consumers’ avoidance of the ‘noise’ from traditional media, eg advertising, direct mail. It is not quite so easy to ignore someone in person.
• The need for companies to stand out from the crowd and be noticed in commodity markets – people remember and talk about experiences to others.
• Increasingly virtual companies, needing to create a physical presence.
• The requirement to create relationships and engage with customers in order to build advocacy – a valuable intangible asset.
• To demonstrate more targeted value to customers as competition increases – experiences go a step beyond product and service.
• The ‘hype’ around customer experience and a vague understanding that customers/consumers want experiences.

A lot to learn

However, as with customer experience management, there is a lot of misunderstanding about what EM actually is, and its business case. Hype is fanning the flames of growth and making EM vulnerable to misuse and client disappointment. To be successful in EM there has to be a strong focus on strategy, creativity, customer research, values, metrics, customer feedback and integration with other customer communications. Results take time and the path needs to be well plotted. EM is more expensive than FM, but not all customers understand that and they take short cuts, often egged on by ardent procurement price cutters who most definitely do not understand it.

This has led to new boutique EM suppliers like RPM, Closer and Carbon distancing themselves from old FM war horses like CPM, FDS and Headcount Worldwide. Battles over scope and definition have raged in the marketing press, adding to client confusion. FM, say the EM people, is a mass market broadcast technique that promotes to the wrong people at the wrong time, ‘interrupting’ them. Meanwhile the large FM providers have opened EM subsidiaries to maintain market share and full service, ignoring the perils of margin differentiation in the techniques.

But this turf war is pointless, rather than looking at ‘communication category’, the industry - both clients and suppliers - should look instead at building up customer engagement over the lifecycle using a blended EM/FM techniques integrated with other communications. A target education event to teach new customers how to use their iPod should also have product sampling – and if it’s done in store should be integrated with merchandising. To capture potential customers, firms might offer car trailing days at exclusive hotels (if the brand is exclusive), or ask a customer community to give our samples of product they liked to their friends.

Experiential marketing is a developing ‘scientific art’ growing out of the mature field marketing industry, to meet new customer needs in customer engagement. There is, as yet, no such thing as ‘best practice’ - instead it’s a case of experimenting creatively based on a sound relationship objectives and detailed results monitoring. Most of all, customer experience managers should enter the brand manager den and get up to speed with what is happing in this evolving, area; there is a lot to learn from it.

Read more features, practical case studies and white papers about customer experience management.

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