Some thoughts from Brian Shepherd
Our experience of the media is changing rapidly...
Some thoughts from Brian Shepherd, CEO, MICE Group
Our experience of the media is changing rapidly. Across the world, television and radio services are multiplying by the day, and reaching an audience has become a more complex task.
The ongoing fragmentation we are seeing in these conventional media means that brand marketing strategies must change. In 2007 companies that are accustomed to working with conventional media and its established buying models may be more willing to consider trying a newer model - experiential marketing.
Experiential marketing is based on the brand-connecting power of face-to-face activities which create physical interaction and engagement with brands, providing a means to get key messages across to target audiences - and in a way that ensures they will stick.
The advantages of this kind of powerful and direct communication include the ability it has to bring brands to life, creating a personality to enhance brand values, create emotional attachment and encourage customer understanding, trust, loyalty and, ultimately, word-of-mouth recommendation.
A success story can be found in the example of the Motorola ‘MotoFunkTour’ - an 18-European city tour experience to immerse a ‘young’ consumer audience in the Motorola brand and change perceptions about its new mobile phone products.
This five month-long experiential campaign was devised to reach, entertain and engage with three distinct demographic groups who make up this audience - skate parks and skateboard competitions to target 15-to-20 year olds; bars and cafes to target late-teens and early-20’s; and business enterprise parks to target young professionals.
During the MotoFunkTour thousands of members of the target audience groups were immersed in the Motorola brand and had the opportunity to see, interact and communicate with the latest handset features and accessories. Results of a research programme demonstrated that the experiences had changed perceptions about Motorola mobile devices; had a significantly positive brand connection impact on their future purchase decisions, and had ‘vastly improved’ attitudes held about the Motorola brand.
Decision-makers in the media marketplace are beginning to understand the importance of experiential, which is seen to be one of the biggest growth areas in marketing over the next five years. This is a response to the internationalisation of commerce and media fragmentation that increasingly allow audiences to choose how to ‘consume’ information.
In a survey that MICE Group published towards the end of 2006, nearly half of all participants anticipated increasing their experiential marketing budgets in the next two to three years. 80% of participants described it as important within their overall marketing mix, more than half viewed it as the most effective way to build brand loyalty, 74% agreed that it is the most effective way to encourage word-of-mouth recommendation and 85% agreed that its impact on audiences can immediately be measured.
Its growth is driven further by the boom in multimedia technology, which makes marketing experiences more dynamic and richer in content. The only way to touch hearts and minds is by stimulating the senses through personal, targeted and interactive experiences and environments which cement closer relationships between audiences and brands.
The message delivery becomes open and personal, and feedback and interaction are relevant and immediate. There is a direct emotional attachment to the experience, unlike with a TV or radio advertisement, and an appropriate context is created in which to connect the brand with the audience.
With thorough planning and the right allocation of resources, experiential marketing can be very potent. Clients like its immediacy and effectiveness at encouraging word-of-mouth recommendation and the proven impact that can be measured against tangible criteria. More and more companies now know this from their own experience, hence the accelerating demand for the services of experiential and live event marketing agencies who work as out-sourced partners to the marketing, human resources and public relations departments of leading brands.
Key decision-makers need to think carefully about how to fund this kind of out-sourced relationship in the future. They must have a realistic expectation of costs, which is not always the case at the moment. However, when the right solution is reached in a partnership between the agency and client, there is no more effective way to get a message to resonate with the target audience than through an experiential marketing campaign.
If marketers focus on the highest value audiences - whether they are partners, employees, investors or consumers - at the right time and in the right place, then experiential marketing can play a clear role in securing their emotional attachment to key messages and build the right foundations to long term, strategic relationships.
