Staying Top of Mind with Consumers
In a highly competitive market, how can Experiential Marketing accentuate your brand?
How many times have you done the good old eenie meenie to choose a salad dressing from an ever growing option pool?
That’s right, every. single. time.
To avoid having other brands gain your potential consumers, it’s essential to have a strategy for your brand to be on the top of consumers mind. Ideally this facilitates your consumer’s decision process regardless of how many new ranch flavors keep popping up! To do so you should view your brand & consumer relationship in the same way you view your amicable relationships, the more experiences you have together the closer you grow. In short if I get to hang out with someone for a while and I like them, i’m more likely to call them again to hang out. Obviously there are a wide range of ways to create consumer experiences with brands but the one we focus on today is in my point of view the most effective and here is why:
Talk human to me
As I mentioned before, you can view your consumer & brand relationship as a human experience with interactions and experiences. Although it is important to focus on digital mediums to build a relationship with your consumer, enhancing face to face experiences can only lead to a stronger bond especially with digitally frustrated consumers (think older audiences or the hipsters who think social media is killing our brains). To do so Experiential Marketing allows you to create an experience with a consumer in a wide number of real life ways. First of all you humanize the brand which allows the consumer to put a face (hopefully friendly)to your brand and product meaning that during their decision process they are more likely to remember that friendly face and choose your product. This real time interaction also allows for valuable consumer insights and explanations as the people managing your event can have conversations with consumers to address questions or concerns about your product.
Add Dimension
Another opportunity available in Experiential Marketing is to add an emotional dimension to your brand. In other terms you are re positioning the brand within your consumers mind, where something as trivial as dish washing liquid can become emotional through the experiences and various values your brand defends. For example a brand with which you wouldn’t expect there to be much of an emotional engagement with, took an angle that positioned the brand in an extremely valuable gender equality viewpoint. Under Armour ran a campaign that positioned the brand as a defender of gender equality through a brilliant digital campaign that you can see here.
Appealing to the emotional side of a consumer has the ability to take a low involvement product to a high involvement product by making the consumer feel more than they think. Ideally that is exactly what Experiential Marketing does, it layers on a consumer feel good sentiment based on a good experience with the brand.
How to garnish Experiential marketing with Digital platforms
Although I talked about a real life experience and friendly faces, now a days the (virtual) reality is that you must also include a digital aspect to any campaign in order to broaden your brand’s reach. To do so you can encourage social media sharing of any experiential marketing event by providing a call to action at some point throughout the event or you can do what Under Armour did, which was including a digital element into the experience itself. As seen with the above campaign, even though it is through a digital medium you maintain a human form to put in front of the consumer so people still remember your brand as a person.. in this case a delightfully beautiful person like Gisele Bundchen. As gorgeous as Gisele’s face is, it also has a larger implication for the consumer, as it brings up an emotional value due to what Under Armour has related her too: the fight for gender equality.
So think of it like this, if you experienced the brand and positively associate it with a cause it defends when you go to choose your next pair of shoes that all look a like and are similar prices which brand would you choose?
That’s right, the brand that you link an experience or a positive sentiment towards.
