Experiential Marketing

Chapter Three Developing an Experiential Strategy

 

Across all categories of products and services, experiential marketing is used in different ways—and for different reasons.

Some brands use experiences to recruit new customers, while others use live engagements for retention. Many companies use experiential marketing for generating trial, while others use the discipline for generating PR. From changing perception to changing sales pipelines, from in-store engagements at retail to guerrilla experiences on street corners—pop-up stores and sales meetings, media launches and developer conferences—the brand experience has become the marketer’s most fluid engagement tool. It can be used in multiple ways for multiple reasons and is considered the modern brand manager’s ultimate utility player. (One Fortune 10 CMO once told us that he considered experiential marketing a sort of Swiss Army Knife for brands.)

But as flexible as it is, and as the many ways marketers use it multiply, the most effective experiential marketing strategies have several shared traits. We’ve studied more than 10,000 experiential campaigns over the last decade and have found successful experience strategies are grounded in five Core Experience Strategy Platforms. (We often refer to these as The Big C’s.)

Connection

At the heart of every experiential marketing strategy is the goal of creating a “connection” with an audience, as a conduit for inciting an action and developing a relationship.

But not all brands ...