How To Create An Experience With Experiential Marketing

Despite the name, creating a good experience with experiential marketing can be difficult. A great quote on experiential marketing – “Anyone can throw up a tent in a high-traffic area and harass the general public, but what does it take to pull off an effective experiential event? A television commercial can easily be muted and ignored, but try ignoring a purring, squirming cat in your arms.”

Looking to the building blocks of experiential, we dig back to a process known as ELT – Experiential Learning Theory – which presents a holistic model of the learning process, as well as a multi-linear model of adult development. Don’t be dazzled by the fancy terminology, essentially what they are getting at is that, in general, people learn better by doing.

This is where experiential comes to the fore. As it’s been known in direct sales circles for many years, the best way to convince someone to buy your product is to put said product in their hands. Again, we can flip channel on the radio or mute a TV when an ad appears, but when someone offers us a seat in a busy shopping centre and a free coffee?

Nescafe Café Menu coffee is bringing this to life, with a pop-up home café appearing across major shopping centres on the east coast of Australia, giving busy shoppers a place to relax and sample the range of Nescafe Café Menu. But it does not have to stay within the realms of retail.

A chilling experiential campaign came from the Transport Accident Commission in Melbourne last year. The TAC, wanting to increase awareness of the road toll in Victoria so far that year, set up a 60-metre long table with a place setting for every person who had lost their life on the road. They began with 257 places, and ended up setting 262.

But how do we creative an experiential event that delivers tangible results, be it in sales, samples, or shareability? The tent on Martin Place, set up to harry and annoy random passers-by is no longer the benchmark and we as a business should look to what sort of interactivity our customers want from our products and brands.

The other big question (for retailers specifically), is how do we take the in-store experience and translate that to another venue? We know our consumers’ path to purchase, from research, in-store movements, and beyond, and the data we can take from that can work in tandem with the in-hand experience of an off-site event.

What it means for us: Experiential marketing is a great game changer for new brands breaking into the marketplace, as well as established brands looking to refresh their image. A chance to get the product into the hands of consumers is nothing to be sneezed at, and it gives people a chance to experience the brand in a controlled, measurable setting. This sort of experience can be invaluable across the different parts of the Woolworths business, and increase the connection between brand and consumer beyond that of the in-store experience.

Australian Consumers Value Brand Experience

The power of the brand experience is on the up with consumers in Australia and worldwide, as newest research shows that interactions with the brand are an important factor in purchase decisions.

This research strongly endorses the view that the leading brands of today and tomorrow will be those with an experience factor, because once the interactions are in place, these consumers are:

• More likely to consider these brands for purchase
• More likely to recommend these brands to others
• More willing to pay more for those brands

In this case, the experience factor was defined as “interactions with the products, employees or people who represent a brand, as well as anything learnt from that brand’s marketing, word-of-mouth, or recommendations from friends, colleagues, or social media.” So while this does cast a very wide net across what the brand can offer to create a consumer experience, where do the majority of brands fall?

A key outtake from the research for companies is what is being called “the experience gap.” An earlier report surveyed 362 companies, of which 80% described their experience offering as “superior.” Conversely, only 8% of consumers rated those same experiences in the superior bracket. A 2012 survey ranked 154 North American brands according to the strength of their experience, with over 60% of them falling in the realm of “Ok” to “Poor.” The key concern is that the experience gap is not being addressed, or even acknowledged.

There were also some interesting outtakes on consumer trends when it comes to brand experience. Working with Australian numbers only, consumers are 74% more likely to consider a brand if they know they’re going to have a great experience, though the cultural Australian parsimoniousness returns to the fore, with 49% of consumers agreeing that they would be willing to pay a premium price if they know they will have a great brand experience – down from the study average of 58% - although they return to the average with 84% of Australian consumers more likely to recommend a brand based on a great experience.

The report breaks down the report even further, looking at the specific demographics of brand experience. It shows that men are slightly more likely than women to have a higher consideration for brands, as well as being more likely to pay more based on good experiences. Conversely, women – known in some circles as the more “social consumer” – are significantly more likely to recommend brands based on experience (we’re looking at you, mummy-bloggers!).

So what does a good experience look like? We’ve broken it down into the five top principles:

1) Invite participation

Great brand experiences are design-driven: simple, accessible, easy, and inviting to the participant.

2) Build around users

Brand experience learned it from the web: people want their experiences to be relevant and feel customised to their needs. Even delivered at scale, experiences should “fit” the user.

3) Make it shareable

Experience sparks recommendation; experiences should be designed to tap into technology as well as our primal human desire to share.

4) Create community

Beyond fuelling recommendations and referrals, experiences should be designed to connect people around brands – to leverage the few to inspire the many.

5) Make it useful

It should go without saying – any experience should add value to people’s lives.

To sum it up in a sentence – good consumer experiences correlate to repurchase, loyalty and recommendation. To see the full report, click here.

What it means for us: Brand experience is part of the next frontier of retail. We have spoken before of the leaps and bounds that technology is playing in integrating into the purchase cycle – and the experiences therein –but technology is not in and of itself a primary connection tool for the consumer: it is still the brand experience. Unfortunately there is no magic brand-experience cure all for businesses: each type of business requires its own consumer experience to be successful. What the top businesses are doing is keeping an eye on their own brand experiences and those of their competitors – the top players in the field should be emulated and built on, not envied.

Live Betting and Television: The Future Is Less Profitable

This week, Opposition leader Tony Abbott came out against advertising betting odds during live sporting matches, citing the political crutch for all popular campaigns – “for the children”. Mr Abbott has said that unless the industry self-regulates this issue, should he come to power in September he will move to ban live betting.

Whether you are for or against this, it will affect a huge part of the Australian television sporting landscape. For years now we have experienced live odds during play for cricket, being advised of the “favourite” for tennis matches, and televised horse racing is nothing but betting odds.

What has come about as the defining issue around this is bookmaker Tom Waterhouse’s inclusion with the commentary team of Channel Nine’s NRL coverage. After what is being purported as a $50 million deal (probably closer to $12.5m), Mr Waterhouse was ensconced with league luminaries such as Ray Warren, Peter Stirling, and Gus Gould, armed with a Channel Nine microphone, and giving opinion on play and offering live odds as the game progressed. 

After initial outrage, the deal was changed slightly and Mr Waterhouse became a guest commentator and his microphone was replaced with a generic one. The issue is still moving, with Free TV Australia (representing Seven, Nine, and Ten) proposing restrictions on live odds during play, while still making allowances for interstate matches and official advertising breaks. While Independent Senator Nick Xenophon is touting the phrase "If you can't have gambling advertising during other G-rated programs, why should sporting programs be exempt?", the Free TV Australia code for gambling does not explicitly say that – only that there are certain times that gambling ads cannot be displayed, with the exception of News, Current Affairs, or Sporting Events (to see the current Free TV placement codes, click here).

All issues aside, what this comes down to is the monetary value inherent in gambling advertising. Many sporting codes rely on gambling advertising money to stay afloat, as well as networks who promote the sporting codes. It is reminiscent of Winfield’s cigarette sponsorship of rugby league from the early 1980’s to the mid-1990’s, when the federal government passed the Tobacco Advertising Prohibition act:  there will be a black-hole of advertising money that would need to be filled, and no shortage of advertisers to fill it.

Australia's Facebook Fatigue

In an epidemic sweeping the globe, Australia has become the next country to submit to “Facebook fatigue.”

The Facebook ad tools are reporting that Australian users have dropped from 11.8m in December 2012 to 11.5m in late April. While this has not been confirmed by Facebook Australia (who cite the number of 12m monthly active Australian users), this is a trend that has been seen world-wide. In 2011, estimates placed that 6m US users had deactivated their Facebook account, while in the UK 600,000 deactivated their accounts in one month alone.

Many things have been cited as the reason for “Facebook fatigue,” including continuing security issues that have plagued the social network, homogeneous news and views, and the proliferation of Facebook advertising.

Security Issues

Possibly the biggest issue that have people on Facebook worried is that of security. More than once, status posts have gone viral promoting a message of how to change your privacy, that if you post a certain message with key (fake) legal elements then Facebook cannot use your images or data, or accounts of how people have had their profiles hacked, stolen, or copied. This has even led to a movie (and following TV show) about who is real on Facebook – in fact one girl in our office has had her photos taken and a fake profile created.

The other side of the security issue is that of online tracking and data collection, which we will cover in more detail in point three.

Homogeneous News and Views

One issue that is driving users away from Facebook is the apparent “same-ness” that people are encountering each day. While this is not an issue that the network can address per se, it is still something that is affecting their user base. Facebook lends itself to allowing the user to interact with like-minded peers – if you don’t have something in common with a person, you probably wouldn’t be their “friend.”

Proliferation of advertising

The newest and most widely-referred to issue causing Facebook fatigue is the proliferation of advertising on the site. Both desktop and mobile users are reporting that the sheer amount of targeted advertising being sent their way is causing them to engage less with the medium. This is where the security and tracking issue comes back to the fore – while targeted ads are great from an advertiser point of view, I can honestly say that, despite being interested in “women” as a profile point, as a male with the relationship status of “married”, I’m actually not all that interested in being told about single Russian ladies looking for love. Then again, I was served an ad last week to help me get more gigs as a magician, which is interesting in the fact that nothing in my Facebook profile even relates to magic. And despite the fact I have gay friends and family members, I may not be interested in the same pages, events, and products that they are.

This way we can understand the fatigue plaguing young adults in the Facebook landscape. The now media-savvy young adult does not want a message yelled at them through sponsored posts and stories, or even what could be construed as offensive Facebook Marketplace ads.

What this means for us: As a predominantly retail company we are generally in the clear when it comes to annoying ads and issues across the media. While different business areas have had Facebook issues in the past this is still one of the best media to target specific consumers with specific behaviours, personalities, and “Likes.” The main thing we need to follow is whether Facebook fatigue continues, and whether it is measurable for mobile vs. desktop users, and tailor our Facebook advertising accordingly.