If you want customers to really engage with your brand, to understand its ethos and have a positive emotional response to it, you might need to go further than a tear-jerking Christmas TV ad. You need customers to see a human side to your brand, rather than a faceless entity that simply sells them stuff – and the way to do this could be experiential marketing.
What is experiential marketing? Well, it can take a few different forms, but essentially involves holding a fun and interactive event that helps customers to actually ‘experience’ your brand. The goal is to encourage interaction and engagement with the brand, its products and its staff in a face-to-face way. You also want to humanise the brand and tell its story, and hopefully to get customers to associate positive emotions with the brand.
A case study: how experiential marketing works in practice
If you can’t quite picture how an experiential marketing event would work for you, take a look at the Asda Price Guarantee marketing event that Amazing Tents helped out with in February 2014. This is a fantastic example of how events can help customers to engage with a new product, or in this case, a new idea. The supermarket was launching a new Price Guarantee, so invited customers and locals along to talk face-to-face with Asda staff and to find out how the new Guarantee worked.
As well as introducing the new concept and getting customers to engage with the brand and its real-life staff, the event also had two other functions. It was a family fun day in the green grounds of Tamworth Castle in Staffordshire, with a bouncy castle and face-painting held in the SaddleSpan event tent provided by Amazing Tents, and it was an opportunity for Asda to film a new TV advertising campaign to promote the scheme. The SaddleSpan tent proved itself the perfect venue for an experiential marketing event, especially on such a lovely sunny day where a more open structure could be used.
Why are events like this so successful?
Firstly, the ‘fun day’ element of experiential marketing events like this one gives customers a reason to attend and it also gives them a fun, positive experience – happy emotions they then associate with the brand. It also enables to engage with the human face of the brand – in this case, its staff – and to be the first ones to test out new ideas and schemes. Lastly, there is the added bonus of using events like this, where everyone is having fun and engaging positively with the brand, to film advertising and marketing material.
Everybody wins!
Experiential marketing events really are win-win, which is why they are so successful. The customers have a fun day and the brand gets exposure for its new products/services, as well as being able to directly engage its target market.
