An excellent piece from our friends at Pool Online about the critical role of experience in the future of brand marketing. Follow the link below to read the full article or download the PDF. The role of experience in the future of branding is one of the hottest conversations that we're seeing today. And trying to define experiential marketing is even hotter. In fact, the International Experiential Marketing Association collected over 200 definitions for experiential marketing.
Like Joe Pine, Martin at Pool Online and many others, that’s why we tend to speak more about experience marketing instead of experiential marketing. Experiential marketing tends to be used more as a tactic and, unfortunately, tactics come and go in popularity. In the last 12 months, just look at all of the hype around branded content, advergaming, blogs and even social networks and their role in the advertising mix. Using experience, on the other hand, is a constant since the beginning of business. We have always used a better experience as a business tool and we believe that it will only become more important in the future.
How would you rate your brand experience? If you can’t even describe it, you might want to start getting your resume together. It’s a good chance your brand won’t survive in the long run!
They've done excellent research for this article and there's a lot of excellent information in the piece, so make sure you spend some time reading the whole thing! I'm sure it's an article that you'll want to pass along as well!
Brand Experience appears to be one of marketing’s latest buzz phrases. As companies look for new ways to communicate their brands, Brand Experience is frequently mentioned as a possible solution and way forward. A need or desire to build experiential elements into the brand communications, indeed into the whole brand proposition, results from a number of crucial factors. Taken together, these mean that the marketer has to find new ways to connect with the target audience.
These factors are widely seen to include the following.
Traditional channels of marketing communications are seen to be less effective. This results from issues such as media fragmentation, ease of changing channels, “zapping”, etc. Furthermore, the sheer volume of marketing communications means a lot of noise but very little opportunity for a message to reach its target. Some traditional media channels have become increasingly expensive without a corresponding rise in perceived effectiveness. Consumers have become more sophisticated. They are often tuning out of marketing communications. Through the Loop analysed the subject of Brand Experience some time ago (Are You Experienced - Pool, Autumn 1999) and came to a number of conclusions. It seemed that one of the key issues was that Brand Experience could not be treated as additional marketing communications channel like advertising, field marketing or direct marketing. Brand Experience appeared to exist on a number of levels, indeed it was about how the brand was experienced across all the consumer touchpoints. This about moving beyond what we can call traditional branding to enable the consumer to become immersed in the brand and, therefore, develop a stronger association or relationship. Consumers start to live the brand. This is increasingly important as markets have become more competitive but products, services and brands have become more similar. Genuine and sustained differentiation is one of the keys to success today and tomorrow. Associating products and services with traditional brand image attributes is no longer sufficient. Even brand imagery has become generic in many cases, reducing the effective of this as a differentiator. Just think how often a product shots could be interchanged in some advertising, for example, with the consumer none-the-wiser.
Consequently, the development of Brand Experience can be viewed as the next logical step for branding. It provides the additional attributes and consumer engagement that enable a brand to stand out in a crowded market-place where differentiation is the key to success.
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