Experiential Marketing

Picture the most amazing day of your life. I bet you remember it in pretty vivid detail; the way the weather was that day, the people that were there with you, even the smells that brought the day to life. I doubt that you can remember your favourite advert with quite the same fondness.

Over the last decade, experiential marketing has exploded. We no longer think of people standing at train stations with freebies, shouting about how great the new recipe of Coca-Cola is; instead, experiential marketing has evolved into something way bigger than we could ever have imagined. Huge, multi-sensory events that engage audiences and promote products in equal measures.

This style of marketing offers audiences a fully immersive experience; one designed to make you feel a valued member of the brand’s community. While the experience may, at face value, be the same for everyone that passes through, how we respond to and interact with the stimuli is very much individual – each one of us having our own interpretation of the experience. It may also play on memories and evoke nostalgic emotions, again helping to tie the person to the brand.

At the beginning of this post, I asked you to recall a favourite day. It’s likely that you chose the day you did because of the way it made you feel. Different trigger points throughout the day, sounds, smells, maybe even tastes which, once replicated in daily life, take you back to that time and place. That’s what experiential marketing offers people; an opportunity to be transported back to that day, reminding them of the product on a regular basis. These people aren’t necessarily going to remember every feature, benefit and price of your products, but they will remember how you made them feel, and when it comes to making a purchasing decision, that means more than all of those things combined.

Author: Jess Baldock