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October 5, 2007 In Archives By Advent

Adventures in Experiential Marketing

Dur­ing a recent recon­nais­sance expe­di­tion into the field of expe­ri­en­tial mar­ket­ing, I found an occa­sion­ally rich and often impov­er­ished cyber world of infor­ma­tion.  My quest to map out the unfa­mil­iar ter­rain and pin down a def­i­n­i­tion for the term “expe­ri­en­tial mar­ket­ing” was fraught with var­ied def­i­n­i­tions, diverse notions, and seem­ingly unfounded assump­tions.  It is my lofty ambi­tion to help shed some light on this rapidly grow­ing branch of mar­ket­ing and add some clar­ity to an often vague and unde­fined term.

At first I strug­gled might­ily and in vain to obtain infor­ma­tion on what EM is.  I could only find what it does.  A gen­eral con­sen­sus seemed to be that EM attempts to con­nect with con­sumers’ emo­tions and to cre­ate a mem­o­rable and rel­e­vant impres­sion.  It cre­ates a strong rela­tion­ship with the con­sumer and is stim­u­lat­ing and engag­ing.  These state­ments are all valid and true but they left me feel­ing incom­plete and a lit­tle lost.  I am reminded of the time I attempted to describe a pen­cil to a friend vis­it­ing from the far­away galaxy of Nepte­bula.  I told him that a pen­cil is a tool that cre­ates lines on paper and is used for writ­ing and draw­ing.  And it was not a bad def­i­n­i­tion inso­far as a thing is, to a cer­tain extent, what it does.  But my dear Nepte­bu­lon­ian friend pro­ceeded to pick up a dirty stick and start smear­ing lines and draw­ing muddy sym­bols all over the paper to prove that he had com­pre­hended my def­i­n­i­tion.  I needed to revise my def­i­n­i­tion.  I dug for a pen­cil in my jeans pocket and handed it to him.  It was yel­low, about 6 inches long, made of wood, and had a lead point on one end and a small piece of rub­ber attached to the other.  Not every pen­cil in the world looks exactly like it but the exam­ple gave him a much clearer idea and showed him the “is” rather than just the “does.”

Obvi­ously, expe­ri­en­tial mar­ket­ing is a much broader and more encom­pass­ing term than “pen­cil” and it is more dif­fi­cult to define.  Trade show booths, mobile mar­ket­ing, live events, branded lob­bies, and exhibits are all gen­er­ally accepted as con­crete exam­ples.  In each of these exam­ples a client is engulfed in a planned and designed envi­ron­ment meant to force inter­ac­tion with the prod­uct or idea and evoke a pos­i­tive and mem­o­rable sen­sory and emo­tional response.

As I mean­dered and strolled through the dark and hazy world of web pages, blogs, and pod­casts I grew more com­fort­able and con­fi­dent about the unfa­mil­iar ground upon which I was tread­ing when sud­denly, from the black­ness, a ter­ri­ble beast flew at me. He was a greedy, mean, and philo­soph­i­cally ter­ri­fy­ing mon­ster who had a forked tongue that oozed with honey.  The expert I had come across explained EM as follows:

“Lets say we want to sell some cof­fee.  Everybody’s cof­fee is pretty much the same.  It’s all hot, it’s all made from beans, and it all gives you a swift kick to the pants to get you going in the morn­ing.  The only prob­lem is that our cof­fee costs two dol­lars more per cup than our competitor’s.  How can we make them pay that?  We can­not appeal to them ratio­nally because nobody would log­i­cally pay more for the same cup of cof­fee.  We must appeal to their emo­tions.  We don’t sell cof­fee.  We use expe­ri­en­tial mar­ket­ing to make them asso­ciate the emo­tions of a nice car, a big house, and a high-flying lifestyle and tell them that that goes along with drink­ing our expen­sive cof­fee.  We sell the pretty girl that will be instantly attracted to you when you are sophis­ti­cated enough to buy our coffee.”

If this was the honey of mar­ket­ing fame and for­tune it had a foul smell. The grue­some and fright­en­ing beast made my knees go to jelly, my morals quiver and my ethics quake. To promise the plea­sure of fame, for­tune and beauty to some­one for spend­ing a cou­ple extra bucks is dis­hon­est to say the least. In dread fear of this phi­los­o­phy, I fled.

Luck­ily the next ani­mal I came across was clothed in white, flow­ing robes and offered me a palat­able def­i­n­i­tion of mar­ket­ing that did not make me fear for the eter­nal des­ti­na­tion of my soul.  This author explained that tra­di­tional mar­ket­ing offered specs, data, and infor­ma­tion about a prod­uct.  Expe­ri­en­tial Mar­ket­ing breaks from this tra­di­tion in that it actu­ally lets the con­sumer expe­ri­ence the prod­uct.  For exam­ple: you could tell some­one that the Suzuki Hayabusa sport bike has a 1300cc, 4-stroke, 4-cylinder, liquid-cooled, DOHC, 16-valve, TSCC engine OR you could let them ride the bike and hear the engine scream like a ban­shee while the G-forces shove their stom­ach against the back of their spinal cord as they tear down the track with cheeks flap­ping hap­pily in the wind. The specs of the bike are cer­tainly impor­tant, but which con­sumer more fully under­stands the prod­uct? Which one truly under­stands the roar­ing power and ungodly speed? And, fur­ther­more, which expo­sure to the prod­uct is more likely to make a last­ing and mem­o­rable impres­sion? Expe­ri­en­tial Mar­ket­ing is sim­ply another way to inform the con­sumer. It is a hands on and inter­ac­tive edu­ca­tion that breaks away from a left-brain bias.

The dif­fer­ence between the two beasts is rel­e­vance and authen­tic­ity.  Let’s say both the cof­fee maker and the bike man­u­fac­turer go to a trade show.  The cof­fee maker sets up his booth with pic­tures of rich men and pretty women.  He tries to con­vince con­sumers that drink­ing his cof­fee will make him rich and suc­cess­ful when in fact the cof­fee has noth­ing to do with either and is not even a supe­rior prod­uct.  The bike man­u­fac­turer puts up a pic­ture of a fighter jet next to the pic­ture of the Hayabusa.  In fact, the Hayabusa is not as fast as a fighter jet but the feel­ing of rid­ing one must be quite sim­i­lar.  The feel­ing of accel­er­a­tion and the emo­tions asso­ci­ated with it would be quite rel­e­vant.  Another dif­fer­ence is that the Hayabusa is the fastest pro­duced bike on the mar­ket and con­sumers are jus­ti­fied in spend­ing extra cash for a supe­rior product.

I hope that our wan­der­ings have brought us to a place of solid ground where we can lay a sturdy foun­da­tion and begin to build a sound under­stand­ing of expe­ri­en­tial mar­ket­ing. One of the keys to mar­ket­ing is dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion. And one of the keys to defin­ing a word is to dif­fer­en­ti­ate it from other words.  And though I loathe to use the word in its def­i­n­i­tion I have found that the most use­ful def­i­n­i­tion is this: the dif­fer­ence between tra­di­tional mar­ket­ing and expe­ri­en­tial mar­ket­ing is the dif­fer­ence between telling some­one about your prod­uct ver­sus let­ting them expe­ri­ence it.  Ernest Hem­ing­way, one of the great­est Amer­i­can writ­ers may be able to give us some idea of what it is like to see the sun set over the scorch­ing fiery red plains of the Serengeti, but you can never truly know until you have expe­ri­enced it.  Expe­ri­en­tial mar­ket­ing offers a dynamic and effec­tive way to edu­cate your poten­tial cus­tomers and com­mu­ni­cate the ways in which your brand is supe­rior to the com­pe­ti­tion.  Through the use of designed envi­ron­ments, events, and exhibits you will be able to cre­ate mem­o­rable and rel­e­vant inter­ac­tions for con­sumers. 

Authored By Advent

Advent partners with organizations to help them visually express differentiation.