Do consumers care about
your brand? I don’t mean like the warm, fuzzy feelings parents have towards
their kids. I mean, do consumers even care that your brand exists at all?
A recent global survey
says, shockingly for the vast majority of brands, that consumers wouldn’t be
bothered if 92% of the world’s brands disappeared. 92%! It’s a stunning – and terrifying
- figure.
So how do you ensure that your
brand sits pretty in that tiny, green and fertile 8% space of the public mind?
One answer is brand
experience. Now that incorporates a lot of things. Obviously, the basics of
marketing: impression (“I like what that brand has to offer me”) and
interaction (“that brand actually gave me what it said it would”) but those are
just starting points.
In today’s hyper-connected
world, brand experience has grown to incorporate many other areas, in
particular, the resurgence of experiential marketing.
It’s simply not enough to just advertise, sell and deliver
anymore. Consumers want more. And spoilt for choice in a free market, they have
every right to demand extra.
So teach them, entertain them, inspire their creativity and,
above all, make them feel special. Long ago that was what The Avon Lady and
Tupperware parties sought to do, place the product in consumers’ hands and
encourage them to have fun with it. That was the start of experiential
marketing but, now it’s back, and thanks to modern communication tools, it’s
massive.
Take South Africa’s Carling Black Label’s “Be the Coach”
campaign. It encouraged people not to just drink a zamelek, it tapped into
their passion for football and gave them the chance to actually ‘be the coach’.
SAB was on to a sure winner with that campaign as it was tweeted, retweeted, posted,
uploaded, downloaded and SMSed everywhere.
The secret to that campaign’s success wasn’t about the
product intrinsics (let’s face it, the boring bits: the barley, hops and
water). It tapped into the public zeitgeist – and engaged it completely. You
can bet SAB – and Black Label - is sitting in the 8% safe zone.
Take Axe’s “Be an astronaut” campaign. Every woman knows
there’s no sexier man than an astronaut - so Axe tapped into that by offering
its male consumers the chance to be an astronaut in real life and, with that, become
every woman’s dream man. Now that’s hot.
So it’s no longer good enough to just deliver your product or
service as well as you can. You have to engage people with it. You have to have
a two way conversation. You have to make people sit up, blink twice and think
to themselves, “Did I really see that?”
I’ll leave you with a last,
amazing example: how one Belgian TV channel delivered its message in what has
to be one of the most dramatic examples of experiential marketing ever.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=316AzLYfAzw