Day 106: UX & Design Trends in 2020 — Part 6: Experiential Marketing
Photo by Adam Whitlock on Unsplash
In the post-truth era, how does the feeling of distrust affect the experience of marketing campaign? How can we bring authenticity back to the tangible world, and design user experience in marketing campaign that resonates the needs of human trust? We observed certain things happened in 2019, which leads to the trends of “experiential marketing” in 2020.
What is Experiential Marketing
It is an emerging trends that instead of broadcasting a message to consumers over and over, hoping that one day it will register in their minds to affect their buying decision process, experiential marketing is a marketing strategy that engages the consumer through interactive and immersive, live experience that will be remembered. The major focus of experience marketing is to invite consumer to experience the brand so that they have their virtual partnership/ ownership in it.
One of my favorite examples is from HBO TV show Game of Thrones, when they launched the campaign, “Bleed for the Thrones” with Red Cross. The campaign encouraged/ helped fans of the TV show to donate blood because there was a shortage during the Winter time in early 2019. The keywords “Winter”, “blood”, and “sacrifice” of the campaign resonate strongly with the plot of the TV show, and the campaign created the social good for the society with blood drive across 43 states and expected 10,000 donations.
The campaign also includes an event in SXSW, where they branded the blood donation process into an “entertaining spectacle of sacrifice”. According to The Drum, “The waiting and recovery rooms are branded like a chamber in the opulent King’s Landing castle. Once donation is complete, participants are then invited to roam the interactive event, which includes a special ceremony at the center of the experience… a local Austin choir sings original songs composed for the event as the Red Priestess personally honors donors by name and hands them a Hand of the King pin.”
Why Experiential Marketing
Unlike the one-way marketing channels such as TV commercial, online ads, experience marketing, due to its diverse way of delivery and immersive experience, there are many folds of benefit:
- Efficiency: Almost at every type of marketing channels, users now have ways to skip/ remove ads; Whether it’s an ad-free service like Netflix, or ad-block plugging for browsers, or recorded tv shows to fast-forward through commercials, it’s clear that users have many ways to block the ads on traditional marketing channels. So how can we find ways to get consumers excited about the brand or product message we want to deliver? Experiential marketing is great at creating immersive and creative experience that customers enjoy and will remember. It’s inviting people to be part of something new and refreshing to get the excitement like people have in a theme park.
- Efficacy: Because customers are part of the journey in the experiential marketing campaign, the fun and joy and all the positive vibes associated with your brand have a stronger impact in customers and they tend to last longer, and have more positive influence in their next purchasing decision. This is also a phenomenon in psychology which is called Dunning-Kruger effect.
- Better brand/ product education: Since the participants in experiential marketing campaign are in the mood of enjoying and absorbing what’s happening around them, they are more willing to pay attention to the message and learn faster and better, therefore it’s easier to get the marketing message through without distraction.
- Learn about customers: Instead of brand messages pushed at the customers, experiential marketing creates two way conversations. It’s a great opportunity to have in-depth conversation to understand customers preferences and expectations.
- Converstion — Turn interest party into customer: It’s also a great sales opportunity since we can better understand the needs of individuals and provide the value we offer from the product line, the personalized experience also have positive impact on sales.
- Conversion — Turn customer into brand advocate: During the campaign, we have a better chance to reinforce brand message and positive vibes so that we can help existing customers grow their brand loyalty (think about comic con); again, the famous Dunning-Kruger effect.
- Create buzz: In the age of “Me-Me-Me”, people can’t wait to find exciting content in order to share on their personal social media feed. The excitement in the experiential marketing campaign is one of the best source to create viral marketing effect. For example, the Netflix team created 200 pop-up Luke’s Diners around the country to serve complimentary coffee to fans of the show “Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life.” It was so successful, as a result, the event’s branded Snapchat filter was viewed 880,000 times.
Why Now?
Back to where we started this post, in today’s world, it’s getting tougher to: 1) get people’s attention, 2) gain their trust, and 3) communicate a clear and memorable message. The era of post-truth make people “turn off” lots of marketing/ branded content. Arguably, the TV show Mad Men have some impact on it, while the character Don Draper famously said: “What you call love was invented by guys like me, to sell nylons.”
These days, we see more and more young investors decide not to buy a company’s stock simply because the company do poorly on ESG (environment, social, and governance). It’s more crucial than ever to find a way to communicate an authentic message through a channel that feels less pushy but more of a two-way dialog. This is where experiential marketing comes in, where human interactions is valued more than campaign messages, and customer’s voice become part of the brand.
“What you call love was invented by guys like me, to sell nylons.” — Don Draper in “Mad Men”
Another major factor is, as we are welcoming more and more Generation Z (people born in the late 1990s and early 2000s) customers in the consumer market, research shows that they emphasize physical experience as equally important as online experience. That said, with the enrich media and constant tech disruption, the online-only, digital-focused marketing which used to target the millennial now gradually shifting to a combine experience between digital and physical world.
Examples can be found that many online-only fashion brands start to create pop-up shops to create physical experience to increase brand exposure (visitors’ check-in and share on their social media feed) and brand loyalty. It’s also a great place that allows brand to experiment innovative ideas (e.g. Amazon’s physical books store fast check out) and brand themselves with innovation to attract more customers.
A successful example is the 29Room campaign, which Refinery29 worked with brands to create curated brand experience in physical rooms for people to take photos and share online. It was so successful that it started in one city and later expanded to all major cities around the country.
How to
Design Principles
So, how to make a successful experiential marketing campaign?What are the design principles? There are 3 key elements in it:
- Memorable: the campaign shouldn’t be just handing out free samples. It has to be creative and unique so it’s memorable and worth sharing, in another word, “social media worthy”. It has to link between the brand value and the customer values so that it resonates with participants so that the message can come across and worth sharing with others.
- Immersive: the experience shouldn’t be simply and bland, it needs to be immersive so that the stimulan and impact on the participants is strong enough to evoke actions, whether it‘s conversion in the marketing funnel, or increase brand exposure such as social sharing.
- Live: the experience needs to be live so that the participants can interact with it therefore create a dialog between the brand and the customers. It needs to be embedded in part of participants discovery journey so that it can create customers invisible ownership.
Upfront Analysis
In order to ideate and plan for the campaign, there are several main tasks to ensure
- Brand value and customer value: The most important step is to go back to the basics, what is the linkage we want to create between the brand and the customer? What do we want to be remembered for? What are some brand elements that can be translated in a creative way that resonates with customer value?
- Touch point analysis: What are some existing touch points that make sense to expand in an unexpected way? What are the channels we haven’t leverage in the physical space, that are highly related to the theme of the brand value?
- Be Agile, and test in smaller scale: Is there a way we can test the idea so that it makes sense economically, and there’s no safety concern? (It actually happened in one of the campaign, that the participants ended up requiring medial care due to the chemical used in the campaign)
Another success example is also by HBO, for the promotion of their TV show Westworld. It recreates the western theme park experience in the TV show, where they hire actors to pretend the lives is the Wild West, and the actors can only interact with the visitor of the theme park in the manor of tv show setting. Visitors can experience as they are the main characters in the TV show.
Conclusion
In the age of distrust, experiential marketing is a great way to humanize the product and the brand, so that we can build trust with customers by involving them in the journey, and increase their loyalty to the brand. We will see more and more brands adopt this strategy, and more design talents get involved in the planning and ideation stage to create a holistic brand experience.
