Designing & Executing Live+ Experiences

Experiential Marketing

OPTIMISE YOUR MARKETING MIX

Experiential Marketing – Optimise your Marketing Mix 2

Marketing is about facilitating, easing, opening, accelerating and shortening the sales cycle – in other words, opening the door to get consumers to have a relationship with the Brand.

Exp hosts an annual African Experiential Marketing Summit across

the continent, in Johannesburg, Nairobi and Lagos, at which it

features some of the industries leading speakers to share with

marketers, the insights, learning’s and best practices that are

happening in this very exciting industry.

At the end of the day, Marketers simply need to connect with their

consumers. It is something that always has, and always will, be the

challenge, but the “how” part is where it gets interesting.

Marketing is more and more about the consumer first and not the

Brand. It is a bottom-up active approach to engaging them as

opposed to a top-down passive strategy.

Advertising is about reach, Direct Mail is about reach and

targeting, Below-the-Line can often rely too heavily on discounting

and Online is about reach and amplification.

Experiential marketing builds the business and the Brand at the

same time and allows the marketer to take the best part of each

of these disciplines and put them together with one single

minded experiential thread, optimising the marketing mix with

the worlds fastest growing form of marketing – Experiential

(Event) Marketing1 – to amplify reach, convert customers and

drive sales.

3 Learnings for you to take out from this paper:

1. Interact personally with the consumer and give them a

GREAT BRAND EXPERIENCE.

2. GENERATE BRAND VALUE by applying strategic direction

and creative wizardry to event fundamentals.

3. Experiential Marketing is BEYOND JUST BEING AN

EVENT or activation – IT’S A CAMPAIGN that can

optimise your marketing mix.

Source1 - Event Marketing Institute (EventTrack 2014)

Connect personally with people in exciting, immediate ways, with the

right message at the right time.

Everything must come back to the Brands relationship with the

consumer – no matter what media or technology is used, there is

nothing better than one-to-one for great story telling.

Experiential Marketing – Optimise your Marketing Mix 3

“We can change the way consumers think,

but how they feel is something deeper

and stronger, something that’s inside

them. How they think is on the outside,

how they feel is on the inside and that’s

what we need to tap into.”

Give the Consumer a Great Experience of your Brand

The best way to change the way people ‘feel’ about your Brand is

to create personal and relevant experiences for them, aligning the

Brands value proposition to the realities of their lives.

It has often been quoted that “nothing is real until it is

experienced” (John Keats) and in a learning study done by Wiman

and Meierhenry, they proved that people remember only 20% of

what they see and 30% of what they see and hear, but the number

soars to 90% when they personally experience (do) something.

In fact, the way communication works is based on this principle, as

the classic marketing model is “you read my message and then you

try my Brand” whereas in fact the opposite is true, as the reality of

today’s world of cluttered advertising is “you see my message

because you already use my Brand.”

This is supported by research done by a leading marketing

theorist, Dr. Jannie Hofmeyr, that showed that as many as 80% of

consumers who watch a Brands TVC are already using that Brand.

Experience precedes the message because it delivers the Brand

promise. The rules have changed and the shift is essentially from

that of passive to active marketing strategies.

So, instead of Brands selling features and benefits, they now offer

a Brand Experience that is developed around the consumer and in

so doing, builds, bonds and renews their relationship with Brands

in the way the Brands deliver on their experiences.

The consumption expetience must live up to (equal) the message

that the Brand sends / gives to its consumers, as this experience is

the message that stays with the consumer forever.

Generate Brand Value

The latest EventTrack research shows that more Brands are using

events and experiences and that the return on investment ratio

that top Brands realise from them is improving.

The smarter (strategic direction) you are in developing and

executing (creative wizardry) your event against your Brand

proposition ensures that the shiny object (what people remember

from the experience) remains the Brand and not the ‘Band’ or the

‘entertainment’.

Interacting with PEOPLE to give them a

Great Brand Experience.

The consumption message must live up to the

message that the Brand sends / gives to its

consumers, as this experience is the message

that stays with the consumer forever.

Experiential Marketing – Optimise your Marketing Mix 4

“I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do

(experience) and I understand.” - Confucius

EventTrack shows that when this is applied, 14% of Brands are seeing a return that is

greater than five to one from their event, compared to 7% the year before. It also

shows that:

1. Events and Experiential are used to increase sales (79%) and increase /

create Brand awareness (78%).

2. People are more inclined to purchase after the event experience, as it:

a. Gave them an opportunity to first try the brand (84%).

b. Helped them realise the benefit of the product (53%).

3. Live events (89%) help most in getting a consumer to understand the

product, compared to TV (5%), Print advert (3%) and online banner / website

(1%).

4. 96% of people interviewed said that attending events and experiences drives

their purchases of the Brand.

So what does this all mean and how can we make it useful in the day-to-day challenges

that we face as marketers?

Experiential is no longer just an event or activation – it’s a campaign

Experiential is a strategic opportunity to actively involve the consumer in your Brand,

bringing its value proposition to life in a creative and impactful campaign – i.e. pre,

during and post ‘event’ – taking into account:

1. Consumers have become more empowered – they create their own

relationships with Brands and you need to build a campaign that promotes

this.

2. It is more about the ‘quality’ and ‘depth’ of the engagement than the

‘quantity’ of the past – develop a campaign that builds quality time with the

Consumer, rather than the ‘amount of times’ or ‘impressions’ a Brand gets.

3. We need to build real and relevant experiences that show and add value to

the consumer’s life.

4. Don’t look to grab the consumers’ attention, but rather give them your

attention as a member of their “tribe” (i.e. their circle of friends and family).

5. It’s no longer about ‘talking’ to people but rather ‘listening’ to and involving

them.

“96% of people said attending

live event drives their purchase

of a Brand.” -EventTrack’14

0%

20%

40%

60%

80%

100%

EventTrack'14

89%

5% 3% 1%

Marketing that Best Helps Consumers Understand a Product

Live Event

TV Commercial

Print Ad

Online Banner ad (website)

Experiential Marketing – Optimise your Marketing Mix 5

An experiential campaign reflects and celebrates people’s lifestyles, allowing

them to escape with Brands that they see as being caring and contributing

positively towards their ‘tribe’.

The universe is built on information that is real and relevant and

this information is generated by peoples Live experiences. It is

through their live experience that they give the information life

and this is then used to enrich other people’s lives, as people

influence each other, each and every day (word of mouth).

The experience must be specifically tailored – pre, during and post

event – as a campaign around the consumers life, moving the

Brand from ‘Brand-in-Mind’ to ‘Brand-in-Hand’ to ‘Brand-in-Heart’,

as a result of the information that they have from their (or their

friends) experiences with the Brand.

It does this by optimising the marketing mix by:

Going to and owning the environment (’Place’) it

executes in and then leveraging this experience to

others in their circle (‘tribe’) – here the ‘Place’ becomes

the social / media platform you use to leverage the

experience.

Letting the consumer experience (‘Product’ and

‘Promotion’) the Brand in an enjoyable way.

Letting the consumer learn (‘Product’, ‘Price’ and

‘Promotion’) something about the Brand that builds

value to their life.

Giving the consumer something new and different to do

(not repetitive), allowing them to escape (‘Product’,

‘Price’, ‘Place’ and ‘Promotion’) with the Brand and the

value it can give their life.

If a Brand is successful in achieving this, it will have friends, fans

and followers that will influence a wider base of consumers and

the Brand will be part of something bigger, something that

matters or is at least enjoyable, rather than just being an event or

a transaction.

Experiential Marketing is beyond just being an event, activation or

transaction.

What do we need to do to change the way we (marketers) think of experiential marketing, in order to apply it differently to our marketing plans and achieve greater success with our target audience?

The brief is critical to the success of any campaign or project

It does not define what ‘media’ to use, but rather the business opportunity, the target audience

and the challenge.

It orchestrates the strategic and creative wizardry that should follow in identifying where, when

and how to engage the consumer and the development of the experiential campaign.

Develop a campaign that is built off a strategic direction to achieve specific experiential goals

A well-defined and executed strategy is directly connected to consumer needs, emotions, and

competitive environments. It must be integrated into the larger marketing programme, deliver a

‘high-touch’ opportunity to connect, succeed in differentiating the Brand and shorten the sales

cycle. A strategy is the broad plan of action – Tactics are the means for carrying out a strategy.

Apply creative wizardry to bring a single, potent strategic thought to life

The single, potent thought or platform is a strategic summary of what is needed to open the door

to the consumer and achieve the Brand opportunity. It is from this that a campaign idea is

conceptualised and taken this across the chosen touch points, applying creative wizardry to how

it is executed, ensuring it impacts and engages the consumer with the Brand proposition.

Bring the campaign to life through in+egrated experiential marketing

It’s no longer just about an event, it’s about how people can participate elsewhere – how you

leverage the event and make a campaign out of it. It’s about developing real, relevant and

personal experiences, and then putting the tools in place to leverage the experiences with others

in the ‘tribe’. It’s about creating In+egrated experiences that can live 24/7/365.

Time

It takes work, planning, and creativity to develop campaigns that are beyond just being an event

– amplifying reach, converting customers and driving sales. If you want to join Brands that are

successfully using experiential to optimise their marketing mix and achieve this, it’s worth the

effort to take / give a good amount of time to develop a Great experience for your Brand!

Experiential Marketing – Optimise your Marketing Mix

As experts of the experiential marketing

requirement, Exp develops Live+ experiential

campaigns, a multidimensional cross media

approach to amplify reach, convert customers

and drive sales.

www.expagency.biz