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You are invited to exercise your imagination! Try visualizing all the people who are talking about your brand right this instant. Try to imagine an army of powerful, influential customers, stating the features and benefits of a product whilst talking to their friends, family and colleagues. These people become intermediaries, carriers of your brand message. So the impact rises exponentially. A study by the research company Seller Fay Group proves that Americans, for example, exchange 4, 5 billion brand information during daily conversations.
Experiential marketing is one of the most powerful tools that we can use to pursue the consumer to talk about a brand, generating the most powerful marketing instrument: word of mouth. A live experience may be a spectacular way to introduce a new brand on the market and to induce a higher selling percentage of that product. The American research company McKinsey found that 44% of the overall decision of buying a product is influenced by interactive experiences of the consumer and not by advertising. However, there is a reason why American companies make more and more use of this type of promotion.
Word-of-mouth power should not be underestimated. The Promotion Marketing Association (US) published a research study reporting that 48,5% of the American consumers mention word-of-mouth as the main decision factor when buying a product.
So how can the marketers pursue the consumer to talk about their brand in a positive manner? Some try to catch the attention of their customers through events that focus on "taboo" subjects and stereotypes and generate news. However, this type of events is less efficient to some industries like pharmaceuticals and investment than to industries like entertainment and fashion. Other marketers recruit a "hidden" selling force formed by consumers with high influence amongst others. P&G is one of the companies that successfully applied this method, "enrolling" 280,000 American youngsters in one of their campaigns. They were given samples and discounts and were invited to express their point of view concerning the company and its products. In return, P&G products had to be part of the discussions these people had with their family and friends daily.
Thus it is not very hard to imagine why companies favor experiential marketing events to determine customers to talk about their brand. A brand experience which integrates entertainment and information, making associations regarding the consumer's lifestyle, generates a memorable experience. The more memorable the interaction, the higher the probability that the consumer will share the experience with people in his social circles.
The shared experience must have a positive impact on the consumer in order to transform him in a brand advocate. Transforming the consumer in a brand spokesperson can be as easily accomplished as transforming him in a brand slanderer. It is said that if you have a positive experience, you will share it with one or two of your friends, but if you have a negative one, you will most certainly share it with at least ten friends.
According to the G.P. Johnson Co and MPI Foundation, the five key characteristics of an event that will succeed in making its audience talk are the following:
1) The interaction they had with the brand
2) The gifts they received
3) What they learned about the product or the company
4) The products they have tested
5) The location of the event.
Creating a unique experience meant to stand out is also based on mechanisms that generate brand impressions like:
- attractive content
- instant photos offered to the consumers
- access to Internet
- incentives, coupons
- invitations to some online communities - forums, blogs, pod casts.
The content generated by the users of blogs and pod casts is an industry in itself, strongly related to word-of-mouth. This is exactly why their relevance to a brand's success in undeniable.
Brand communication must be more than mass communication. It needs to become a real and valuable experience to the consumer. Transforming a consumer into a real brand explorer and nevertheless an active promoter of this brand is truly the greatest marketing challenge of this century.
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Date/location: 8th of September, National Contemporary Art Museum in Bucharest.
Brief:
Launch of the Romanian edition of Elle Decoration.
Create a positive and sophisticated brand experience which will overpass the audience's expectations and will deliver the key messages of the brand.
Audience: Romanian designers and investors from the interior decoration industry.
Concept: "Open the window to your interior universe" - the concept reunited origami art, painting, sculpture, ceramics, ikebana and video to demonstrate Elle Decoration's sophisticated perspective on design.
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Date/location: 18 - 30th September, Bucharest.
Brief:
Conceive and implement events that communicate la Francophonie to the target audience.
Audience: Mass audience, focusing on youth.
Concept: The campaign was built on 3 strategic pylons - creative approaches of informational dissemination, urban events series, complementary with the Bucarest Francophone schedule and unconventional promotion for Bucharest Francophone events.
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Experiential marketing is seldom misunderstood as having as sole interest to the image of a brand, improving the value customers get from a product. But another neglected yet very important role of experiential marketing is to motivate the employees of a company, to determine them to understand and believe in the values of the brand they represent.
One of the Advertising Age magazine's lead editorials stated that this motivational role of marketing is the least used marketing instrument. This mainly happens because the marketers have no insights on the type of communication their employees are drawn to, communication that would inspire better performances and an accurate knowledge of the values the company promotes.
A study of Jack Morton Worldwide Company in 2006, throughout employees in US, UK, China and Australia shows the obvious need of employees for interactive communication. Globally, only 33% of employees are content with the quantity and quality of communication received from their employer. To 82% of them, communication should state the company's vision, and 87% find it very important to understand how they can integrate into this vision. The study clearly shows that employees' live experiences such as events or meetings or communication from the hierarchic superior have a major impact on their behavior and performance. So to raise the efficiency of communication with employees, employers can integrate individual interaction with the superior manager through a live experience. Such examples could be company anniversary events, New year parties and all kinds of companies' partner meetings.
To most of the employees (84%), live experiences bring out information more than any other kind of communication. By accentuating the empathic nature, live experiences must get them to involve in a personal way, they must be associated with personal interests and concerns.
A positive aspect of employees' motivation, directly connected with their attachment to the company values, is their transition from consumer to brand spokesperson. 86% of employees say that participating in a live experience would cause them to positively promote the company they work for. Research has demonstrated that the companies who have this type of promotion have a better image on the market and a higher growing rhythm than their competitors.
Employees wish for an efficient type of communication in order to improve their own performances and thus the ones of the company. When elaborating an internal communication strategy with impact amongst employees, the company and its customers, the role of live experience providers for the corporate sector is as important as that of human resources specialists.
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