Experiential Marketing is a big buzzword these days – as it deserves to be. The truth is that Experiential Marketing is the single most effective way to create a memorable experience for your audience, which in turn provides you a tremendous opportunity to gain their loyalty and remain top-of-mind at consumption moments.

Simply put, Experiential Marketing creates an experience between the brand and the consumer that is immersive. This is important for many reasons, but here are three of the main ones to keep in mind:

A Lasting Connection
In today’s dynamic world, consumers are exposed to brand ads from the minute they log into their social media networks, see call-to-actions all along their commute to work, and truly in any consumer touchpoint. For this reason, brands must stand out with experiential moments that hold a deeper meaning – and ultimately, deeper impact.

A lasting connection is what drives action at the point of sale, it’s what drives action when a consumer is choosing whether to opt for your product or the competitor’s, and it is the only way to ultimately secure long-term brand loyalty.

Brands that focus on creating long-lasting connections with their consumers are much more capable of successfully introducing new products, new initiatives, expanding into new markets, and much more. More importantly, a lasting connection will allow your brand to survive past the toughest moments – because your customers will be there to support you.

Provide an Active Understanding of your Product
The level of complexity of a product is not indicative of whether or not you should invest in ensuring that your product is well understood. The truth is that even the least-complex products still hold unique brand messages and should be shared with the consumer. You want your customer to understand your product through your lens.

Experiential Marketing provides a unique opportunity to educate your customer on your product – how your product facilitates their lives in ways that others can’t, how to make the most of your product, and much more. Why is Experiential Marketing important when considering educating your customers? Because more often than not, education only happens when engagement is in place.

Increase Sales Directly
On-site Experiential Marketing is likely to optimize sales during the activation itself. One of the best ways to encourage customers to purchase your product is by actually showing them why they need it. When properly executed, Experiential Marketing creates an environment that allows for the consumer to try the product, provide raw feedback (which creates an opportunity to address any concerns), and encourage the consumer to actually become a brand advocate.
Through our many years in Experiential Marketing, we have supported our clients with many opportunities to provide experiences for their customers. At the core of our initiatives, these three items always remain true –connection, education, and sales.

Here’s an example of a seasonal Experiential Marketing initiative we conceptualized and executed for our client Samsung.

Experiential Marketing:
A Creepy Halloween in Puerto Rico

What did We Do: 
We tapped into the Halloween holiday to promote Samsung’s Gear S2 and Gear VR products in Puerto Rico. In order to engage the most amount of consumers, we went to where Halloween takes place in Puerto Rico – at the malls. We partnered with Plaza Las Americas to create experience zones near the mall’s famous haunted house. We partnered with other malls in the area to create experience zones in the Claro stores. 

The experience zones had creepy themes themed and allowed consumers to immerse into a Halloween experience while still interacting with the products and learning more about the features. 

The featured experience zone was a haunted house built inside of a Claro store, in which consumers entered and watched a scary Gear VR sample. Other experience zones included scary surfboards, and bikes to sample the Gear VR and Gear S2 products. 

Promoters dressed in scary costumes and gave guests goodie bags to bring the Halloween experience full circle.
What this Meant for the Brand: 

– 4 days of Halloween excitement to consumers while generating awareness and interaction with the brand
– Nearly 400 participants
– Thousands of impressions
– An opportunity for users to utilize the Samsung products and enjoy their features firsthand, thus generating further consumer interest and sales
– Opportunity to showcase the different uses of the product, in non-traditional ways that impact consumer’s day-to-day lives