Experiential content is a must-have for brands that want to stand out and engage audiences. Here are some experiential marketing examples to conceptualize events and create real-world interactions with customers.
Truly impactful content is relevant, personalized, and can be experienced by your target audiences. Ryan Brown, Head of Brand Strategy, Ceros, defines the characteristics of experiential content, in an interview with MarTech Advisor,
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“The overarching characteristic of impactful content experience and experiential content is a belief that creativity matters and experience matters. Many organizations focus on strategy and execution and don’t give creativity and design a seat at the proverbial table. While it’s expected for brands to be ‘experience aware’ in today’s economy, it’s the brands that are ‘experience obsessed’ who are creating the most impactful content experiences by utilizing experiential content.”
Providing unforgettable brand experiences with engaging storytelling, will define how brands will formulate their marketing strategy.
Experiential Marketing Examples to Inspire Your Next Event Strategy
Let’s look at some experiential marketing examples to inspire and help you form real-world connections with consumers.
1. Create Valuable Experiences for Customers
Ryan Brown, in his interview, mentions where marketers go wrong while crafting experiences,
“A common mistake brands make as they try to engage their audience using new technology is that they do it for the wrong reason. Many times, the primary reason for deploying new technology is for themselves and not for the benefit of their audience…When a brand considers their audience’s needs and desires first, they create long-term value instead of short-term (and often short-lived) engagement gains.”
Desperados, a popular beer brand, used technology to create exceptional party experiences for partygoers. AdAge reported, “Epic Stories by You” was a party in Poland at which it gathered 2000 partygoers’ phones to create a light show. The party was imagined by Karolina Gilon from Poland, who felt phones were negatively affecting the way people socialise and party. Guests were asked to give up their phones in return for a beer, and the brand then linked all the screens, playing synchronized animations to the music and abstract-shaped footage.”
Example of How Deperados Created a Memorable Experience
With no distractions of mobile phones clicking photos and recording videos, partygoers could enjoy what mattered the most to them – the party vibe. And, this took their experiences to the next level.
Learn More: Marketing to Kids Through Interactive & Experiential Marketing: World Children’s Day Special
2. Build Authentic Experiences With Purpose and Creativity
Ryan Brown also stresses on balancing both customer and brand experiences to deliver authentic experiences for the target audience.
“When a brand brings brand purpose and creativity to answering the how and why of using new technology, it not only makes the experience feel more authentic to their audience, it will help them differentiate and stand out from their competitors,” he says.
The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) launched an experiential campaign to bring the plight of elephants to the forefront during a conference on illegal trade in London. The campaign displayed a hologram of a five-foot elephant and other endangered species, such as leopards and turtles, on the streets of London. WWF recorded 124,664 signatures on their petition to stop wildlife crime.
This campaign could raise awareness about wildlife crime and could also deliver an unforgettable experience for people.
We’ve unveiled a hologram elephant in London! Why? To remind global leaders who are gathering there this week that they need to take urgent action to #EndWildlifeCrime and #StopWildlifeTrafficking pic.twitter.com/v4im4IkRR3
— WWF 🐼 (@WWF) October 11, 2018
WWF’s Tweet to End Wildlife Crime
Learn More: Top Experiential Marketing Trends to Look Out for in 2020
3. Leverage the Right Resources
“Many brands make a mistake when using new technology, i.e. investing in the tech but not in the people or processes needed to make the tech effective at connecting and engaging with their audience. To take advantage of new tech effectively often means a brand must develop new ways of thinking and operating to ensure they have the right resources and support in place,” said Ryan Brown.
And here’s an interesting experiential marketing example that explains exactly that:
Sonos (a wireless sound system), while promoting its new integration with the Google Assistant in a three-day pop-up music experience, created three rooms – one each for Holly Herndon, The National, and the artists from the Beggars Group, to illustrate the physics, structure, and emotion that music often conveys.
Image Source: AdWeek
An Example of One of the Rooms Created for the Artists by Sonos
Here is how AdWeek described the campaign, “To demonstrate the physics of sound in the first room, Sonos partnered with musician Holly Herndon…With 18 Sonos Play:5 speakers around the room, the sound moves across a virtual acoustic space, matched in real time with strings of light bulbs dangling from the ceiling…To move the sound around the room, the studio created algorithms that match the location of speakers to the lights, allowing the lights to follow the sound as it moves from one side to the next…
…For the second room, Sonos and Google wanted to show how a song is structured. To illustrate it, Sonos took The National’s hit song “Rylan…the team created five pieces of art spaced around the room like a live band. Each piece of art covered a number of hidden Sonos speakers, while also emitting colored light to go along with seven stems from the track that let the lights symbolize the various instruments and vocals…
In the final room, Sonos sought to convey the emotion of music. There, visitors can select a song based on the mood they’d like to feel. While wearing an EEG headset from Muse to measure brain activity, each person’s brain activity then appears in the form of a digital data visualization on a screen in front of them…The choices of songs included many from Beggars Group.”
The larger-than-life experience was a successful amalgamation of technology, people, creative thinking, practical implementation, and the right resources and support.
Learn More: The Essential & Evolving Role of the Experiential Marketer: Q&A With Splash’s Amy Baron
Lessons to Learn From Experiential Marketing Examples
Creativity, authenticity, technology, and relevance together culminate in differentiated and memorable experiences. Marketers need to push boundaries and experiment to serve relevant, personable, and immersive experiential marketing campaigns.
Here we sum up our three key learnings from our favorite experiential marketing examples:
- Be what matters to your people and create value for them.
- Create experiences that reflect your brand values and stay authentic.
- Technology makes the experiences stand out, but the right people and resources make them memorable.
The above experiential marketing examples took off because they were rememberable experiences. For your 2020 marketing strategy, remember, creativity, stellar experiences, technology, customer and brand experiences, along with people and processes will make your experiential marketing campaigns shine.
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