We have a whole bunch of underutilised tools at our disposal. We have the technology to really give shoppers an exciting brand experience. We can appeal to all the senses and cause a real stir. And we have our wits so we can ambush people with music, performance or events in the street or on buses that bring a brand laughingly in front of them. Marketing can be smelly, bright, noisy or fluffy – it’s up to you.
Experiential marketing: senses to bring your brand to life
Experiential should do what it says … play with the senses. It’s been on the verge of happening for years but I realise in the three years since I wrote the first edition of Brilliant Marketing nothing much seems to have happened.
Maybe the trouble is it’s a ‘nice to have’ rather than a must-have. Maybe my vision of a heather-floored dome with the cry of grouse, the sound of a waterfall and the scent of chilled, Scottish air with a running film of Scottish Highlands scenery, clouds scudding across the ice-blue sky, as a tasting venue for a new malt whisky brand just won’t happen. Or maybe it will … why not?
How experiential marketing should work
This used to be called merchandising a brand. Now it’s potentially a serious science. It allows you to dramatise your brand sensually and far more excitingly. This is theatre, where the customer experience is raised to a high level of interest. As such your opportunity is to be theatrical and amaze and engage. This is 21st-century merchandising. Brilliant experiential marketing is potentially very sexy.
What is changing?
- There’s a need for something different. What most marketers are currently doing would have been OK in the past but now we live in much more discriminating times. Theme parks, films and video games have heightened the point at which our senses respond.
- Retail can be more than a warehouse experience. Technology has moved on so fast we really can create virtual-reality situations. Very few of the obstacles that once stopped us doing convincing experiential marketing exist any more. Shoppers need to be wooed a bit more cleverly.
- Premium brands need love. In the spoil-yourself world of expensive mega brands, the experience of seeing how they are romanced is phenomenal in the great New York stores. This is branding at its highest level.
- Our brains are changing. Susan Greenfield believes that years of internet exposure have changed the way we think. I agree. We need to stretch ourselves with fear (theme park rides), taste (new world foods), new sensations (fish pedicure), new 3D films, adventure holidays, great surround sounds (water, storms and birdsong) and more.
A short sensual adventure
Let me take you on a short journey, a journey through some of the most wonderful department stores and shops in the world. Share with me the ‘rush’ of excitement a great shopper experience and experiential marketing can deliver.
- La Fromagerie, Moxon Street, Marylebone. It smells wonderful. The shop has a long, shared table in their tasting café. Sacks of succulent, speciality potatoes lie rumpled on the floor. It’s a world of quiche and sun-dried aubergine. First and last this is a cheese shop. The ‘cheese room’ is a cornucopia of smelly delight, with the hiss of the humidifier in constant action.
- Selfridges. Actually the whole store owes more to the world of magicians and caves of treasure than it does to retailing. Its ethos is indulgence, and they are indulging millions of pounds to make their point. It’s pure theatre. Its credo is indulgence. And expertise. Talk to the girls in Clarins and you are talking to skin experts.
- Experiential for pets. A German pet food company, Affinity Petcare, had posters that said ‘Listen to your nose’ at pet height. Behind the posters they placed fresh pet food, the smell of which was emitted through small holes. Lots of dogs sniffing. Lots of interested owners.
- ScentAir: spraying a scent of baby powder in baby departments of stores shows sales go up as a result. ScentAir have now gone into partnership with Muzak – sound and smell in harmony.
- Castlemaine XXXX has created Truckmania and the Gold Retreat, a big two-storey bar that is assembled quickly from the back of a truck to provide a bar, terrace and stage on which brand lovelies create a dance floor so everyone can party – and they do party, drinking lots of beer in the meantime.
- Prada in New York: experience effortless superiority and rich minimalism. Its vast sweep of wooden boards descending into an undulation of mannequin displays and then rising again has to be seen to be understood. And do you feel different about Prada after going in there? I actually wanted to buy stuff in there – anything … that’s how good it was.
- Dean and Deluca in New York – a temple dedicated to delicatessen delight.
Adding a new dimension to presentation
Experiential marketing is about leveraging the sensual aspects of a brand. When you do it well and memorably it’s brilliant. The need to stand out in a retail environment makes one wish for more weapons. Technology has come on so far you can do almost anything. We all want experience at first hand, which is the reason the best theme parks have done so well and why investment is going into revving up the buzz. But it’s not just theme parks. The demand for live performance is soaring. The O2 Arena is a roaring success.
Today live experience is the thing. Customers expect it and relish the experience.
Buzz marketing – when everyone starts talking about you
How ‘buzz marketing’ works (or marketing as we used to call it)
The idea of getting talked about predates marketing. You get talked about by breaking the mould and being attention-getting. What it stands for today is something that turns enough heads in enough places and that gets a brand on the mental map. It will usually take the form of a weird idea in action, a happening (an unplanned event), a stunt or an idea that grabs people’s attention and gets free media. This is definitely not textbook stuff. There was once a newspaper headline, ‘Freddie Starr Ate My Hamster’ – it wasn’t true – that was buzz.
Remember who’s in charge – the consumer. Kevin Roberts (again):
‘For the first time the consumer is boss, which is fascinatingly frightening, scary and terrifying because everything we used to do, everything we used to know, will no longer work.’
The implications of customer power
We shall have to work with the consumer more closely. This is going to be more like marriage than marketing. Now we have to look for more interactivity and sharing of brand ownership with them. As the Coca-Cola fiasco with ‘New Coke’ in 1985 showed – consumers and customers are in charge. Coca-Cola also discovered the brand is stronger in consumer hands than bottler hands.
What is changing?
When I first entered marketing, this category was described as ‘below the line’. For the purposes of simplicity I’m going to enclose ‘buzz’, ‘ambient’, ‘guerilla’, ‘high impact’ and ‘stunt’ marketing under this broad category, which signs up as a cousin of PR and event marketing.
Its current fame is a result of its being embraced online because it’s so easy to broadcast a come-to-this-now on Facebook or Twitter. It is cheap creativity. However, what it represents and stands for is the kind of bravery of attitude that Nike or Snapple demonstrated early on in their existence.
How to be noisy
Brilliant buzz marketing is all about getting attention, then surfing the wave of public interest and getting a smile:
- Publicise a vegetarian restaurant by putting a sandwich board on a calf that walks around and proclaims ‘Make my day. Eat at Cranks.’
- A bank manager in a midwest town of America dressed in white with a mask to launch his new system of home loans and who rode his white horse down the high street at a gallop: ‘The Loan Arranger Comes to Town.’
- The ‘Will it blend?’ series on YouTube for Blendtec is a blast and a buzz. Watch them actually blend an iPad. GEICO Car Insurance and Blendtec both push the boundaries of silliness and make £1 look like a lot more.
- Carlsberg mounted a ‘We don’t do litter’ campaign, which comprised dropping £20 notes randomly on to London streets each bearing a sticker on which that campaign message appeared (budget £5000).
Being worth a mention means passing the ‘You won’t believe this but …’ test.
Word of mouth is not an accident – you have to work at it, just as you have to work at fame. Creating buzz is achieved quite often by doing the really counter-intuitive thing.
NOT BY BEING NOISY LIKE THIS.
But like this.
(Whispering loudly.)
Unlocking the buzz
- Be relevant – if you aren’t on the consumers’ radar screen you can’t cut into their consciousness. You’ll just be noise.
- Be accessible – if you aren’t their kind of person then however good the message you have you’ll struggle. Example: M&S trying to reach most teenage kids = disconnect. Facebook trying to reach a 70-year-old = tricky.
- Be different – being ordinary is ‘soooo boring’ … zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. ‘Same as … same as’ is not news. So unless you do your buzz idea with originality you will sink expensively and to deserved snorts of derision.
How to focus on key people to maximise the buzz
Focus on ‘opinion formers’, people who can enlarge and embellish your story. Identify the people in a group who can dramatise the message, those whom Malcolm Gladwell, best-selling author of The Tipping Point and The Outliers, calls ‘mavens’. Understand what will make them ‘look and laugh’ and create a buzz by enrolling them, the talkers and gossip spreaders, as your ‘buzz force’.
Use all the cheap media at your disposal; your job is to capture a few important imaginations.
Run chat rooms where your customers can criticise you. Remember that the truth is your strongest weapon. And spread the word. Always use ‘tell a friend’ instructions – buzz is a constantly interesting conversation.
Be exciting and don’t be a control freak
You will never get word of mouth going by being ordinary. Some, like Innocent, aren’t ordinary. You have to take a few risks, because once the buzz is going you have lost control and the consumer will take over anyway. Buzz marketing is like skating on black ice. A bit dangerous but awesome when you pull it off.
Some of the most interesting ‘buzz work’ has been done by ‘flash mobs’ – strangers coordinated by text to appear at a given public place and act out some performance then leave.
IE (Improv Everywhere) appear in New York and have now acquired some fame for repeating a five-minute sequence of events in a Starbucks coffee shop over and over again for an hour. Or by flooding a Best Buy store with members dressed exactly like the staff. The thought of walking into a store and having five store-uniformed people surrounding you saying, ‘Can I help?’ – ‘No, can I help?’ – ‘Please let me help’ and so on, is wonderful and memorable.
Actors are cheap and are brilliant. Get a bunch to work on a buzz with you and see.
A choir in Holland publicised a concert by assembling surreptitiously as ordinary members of the public, one by one and in little groups, in a shopping centre and spontaneously bursting into brilliant song.
How strategic can you be?
Here’s where the Nike School of marketing, the philosophy of which is ‘If it isn’t damaging and if you like it and you think the consumer will like it too, just do it,’ runs head on into the marketing attitude of a Kodak or Heinz, who will do nothing if there’s a strategic disconnect. In the end you have to value how positive the buzz will be in relation to the time and effort involved because, ultimately, the return on your investment really does matter.
Spontaneous events and happenings: these are what Ben & Jerry’s did, brilliantly, creating parties on the web or by text, inviting people to sample their products at a given place at a given time. Someone who worked with them said one of the keys was they were very generous in sampling.
There’s a story of ‘ambush marketing’ in which Nike usurped the main sponsor, Adidas, at the Atlanta Olympics by simply buying up all the trackside posters and poster sites in the city for the period of the Olympics. Unsurprisingly this was a one-off. At the Beijing Olympics, for instance, all the poster sites were held by the governing body, who then sold them on to sponsors. At the London Olympics write Ben & Jerry’s on your forehead and you could end up in gaol!
Agent Provocateur = sexy lingerie – quite a bit naughtier than anything else in the high street and that wonderful line ‘More S&M than M&S’ did the business for them. Great PR and, like Avis with Hertz, always clever to compare a small brand with a huge brand.
Sony Ericsson’s new, improved mobile phone with a great camera was promoted by actors who got tourists to take photos of them with this brand new object and then explained the product when the tourists asked questions. (This is sort of ‘reverse-chugging’.) Word got out that something new and interesting was about. People started talking.
The Drive-U-home Service – the guys doing a ‘We’ll drive you home in your own car if you get pissed in this pub’ service advertised above pub urinals for just when you are reflecting that driving might be a really bad idea, should hopefully have done well.
Pay to change a bit of landscape and create a story. Like green postboxes or yellow London taxis. Or paint a town pink like they did for Barbie. A real talking point. Or plant a wall like GE have done in Trafalgar Square. They’re saying GE is a green company now.
In Belgium there’s an event in a cinema when young couples arrive late for a movie to be seated in the last two seats amongst an audience of 148 aggressively tattooed bikers. When they eventually and successfully clamber over these belligerent men to their seats they are spot-lit, the cinema erupts in applause and now-beaming bikers hand them each a Carlsberg. And up on the screen – ‘That calls for a Carlsberg.’ A funny and heart-warming idea.
Brand pigeons – a genius painted brand names on the breasts of pigeons in Times Square. Not popular with animal lovers. But it got talked about.
Cool target marketing – The stunt pulled by DDB (the advertising agency) for VW in 2004 was to sculpt a full-size car in ice and place it parked in a London street. It took 12 hours to melt.
Brilliant word of mouth: gather round and listen
- Where: The places where buzz occurs will be in the street, on public transport or in a public space, not in conventional media.
- How: The idea of buzz is to ambush the consumer with an idea they find funny (in his own way, the best example of buzz in advertising was that funny orange Tango man who went around smacking people).
- Who: The key in ‘buzz’ is to target tightly, especially opinion formers who’ll pass it on.
- Who’s in charge: Remember you can’t guarantee being in control of it. You are setting something up that may be taken over by the consumer. Look at Facebook parties.
- What: This is the world of jokes. A good joke gets everywhere in hours now. Does your buzz idea have those legs? Buzz is for younger rather than older markets.
- Checklist: Is the core idea broadly brand-relevant, easily accessible to the consumer and different?
Most of all, ‘buzz’ is fun and pantomime. Serious brands which take themselves very seriously hate it.
Buzz is for the rebellious and those who want to make £1 look like £10.
Top ten experential and buzz marketing
- Appeal to the real hidden persuaders – people’s senses. No one’s doing this well right now.
- Live performance and the experience of new is a key driver in our lives.
- Why let luxury brands hog the experiential limelight?
- Make sampling your brand an adventure, not a ‘touch-point in the marketing journey’.
- Get people talking about it by giving them some fun.
- Think up ways of putting your brand on stage or putting it up in lights.
- Talk to opinion formers and mavens. Excite them. Get them talking.
- Don’t be cheap because the medium’s cheap – invest in style but in a maverick way.
- The best event always ends as a brilliant party.
- Think young, think wacky – get some excitement going. Buzz has no zzzzzzzzzzzz in it.