287. Experiential marketing

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Question – what makes experential marketing different from other marketing?

Answer – experiential marketing is so named in that it taps all the senses (sight, hearing, taste, smell, movement, linguistic etc.) at the same time in order to impart a profound communications experence to a selected, influential audience.

Key action points

Experiential marketing is what B2B marketers do naturally, and what consumer marketers are catching onto, with the realisation that you only need a few highly influential people to get your message across.

In their ordinary marketing activities, B2B marketers will talk to customers, visit them, set up trade shows and live new product launches, do exhibitions within customer sites, promote themselves within the trade press, and cultivate key influencers (such as government officials, NGOs etc.).

Which is as easily said as done if you are only addressing a limited community, but what happens when you are a consumer brand marketer addressing millions? You cannot meet all your customers!

However, if you learn from the disciplines of NLP (neural linguistic programming) and The Tipping Point, you can potentially get the same effect by engaging some critically influential people in a truly memorable experience.

The psychological NLP school is the one that publicised the notion that only 10% of the impact of a communication is based on words. 90% of communication relies on other communications channels, and especially body movement and posture. For instance, where you look is important. Looking up suggests intellectualism, looking directly forward is assertive, looking down suggests shiftiness and/or depression. If you speak in short, crisp sentences, you label yourself as a leader. If you speak in long, articulate sentences, you position yourself as an academic.

The Tipping Point argued that only a very few people are needed to spread an epidemic. Its author, Malcolm Gladwell, cited several small-scale actions that have had global effects, such as the spread of venereal disease, the Paul Revere’s ride to spark the American Revolution, and the sudden resurgence of Hush Puppies.

Marrying these two thoughts with experiential learning, experiential marketing attempts to identify the key influencers on your target customer audience, and to involve them in a live real or virtual event which energises them to spread the word to thousands and millions of people.

It is therefore also closely related to the concepts of “viral marketing” and “buzz marketing”.

In more detail ….

NLP research suggests that although we all want to describe our products & services in interminable and loving detail, few people are willing to read it, and even fewer are capable of doing so (less than 15% - bad luck, Mud Valley!). The same thing goes for presentations. From a presentation lasting 1.5 hours, we will take away, at most, three thoughts.

In order to get your message across memorably, you need to use a blend of channels. As human beings, we like pictures and visual imagery (thus all the “visual candy” on TV, websites and magazines). We also like people’s voices and other enticing sounds (try watching a film without a soundtrack, e.g. the recent “War of the Worlds”). We memorise smells, without much ability to analyse them (e.g. essence of roasted chicken wafted around supermarkets). Our brains are instinctively attracted to movement.

So, if you want to get people up and motivated, bombard them multi-sensory inputs, preferably in an appropriate context (memory is context-dependent). That is the live event accounted for.

But you cannot get all your millions of consumers into one event, typically, although Live Aid!, “Run the World” and “Make Poverty History” did just that virtually.

What you need to do, therefore, is to select for the event those few people who will get your message across effectively, efficiently and economically to the millions.

According to The Tipping Point analysis, you need three types of people:

1. “Mavens” – thought leaders (e.g. celebrities, journalists, fashionistas)
2. “Connectors” – people who know lots of other people, and make it their pastime to talk to them (bloggers would be one example)
3. “Salespeople” – people who are good at persuading others to try things

Get these types of people to an event, fire them up, and set them loose. That is the fundamental concept of experiential marketing. You then want to keep them informed of developments through repeat events, websites, magazines, e-mails etc..

Another, old-fashioned, example of experiential marketing, is the massed rally – a march, food and drink, speeches, and entertainment. Participants to the rally then go off and tell people all about it, write about it, and the event itself provokes news coverage and punditry.

The bonus is that those people attending an experiential marketing event are also considerably more likely to buy your product / service, and more quickly.

Some tips on developing an experiential marketing event:

1. define your target audience
2. define your objectives for the event
3. decide how to measure/track your objectives
4. identify the people who are most influential with your target audience:
   • thought leaders
   • socialisers
   • persuaders

5. develop the strategy for the event, bearing in mind the full range of your brand identity:

• central organising thought
• personality
• stories
• values
• symbols
• taste/dress/appearance
• emotional benefits
• hard benefits
6. develop key messages for the event, based on both rational and emotional persuaders. These messages must be absolutely authentic, and enthuse the target audience to evangelise your brand and its messages on your behalf
7. decide how the key messages and brand identity can be communicated multisensorially
8. define the event, ensuring that the location/space is the most appropriate for the target audience(s)
9. pre-publicise the event in the national/trade press, on the web, through PR etc..
10. manage the event
11. publicise the event
12. follow up the event with mechanisms to keep people informed of developments

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