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November 5, 2007 In Transcripts By Advent

xmt-001: What is Experiential Marketing?

[This is a tran­script of the free audio pro­gram, Expe­ri­en­tial Mar­ket­ing Today. The audio ver­sion of this con­tent is avail­able at: Episode 001: What is Expe­ri­en­tial Mar­ket­ing?]

Announcer: Wel­come to “Expe­ri­en­tial Mar­ket­ing Today.”

[intro music]

Todd Austin: Wel­come to the first episode of “Expe­ri­en­tial Mar­ket­ing Today.” This show is about the the­ory and prac­tice of using expe­ri­ences to engage audi­ences with the authen­tic nature of a brand and a company.

We believe that it may be the most pow­er­ful tool mar­keters have, but it’s also some­thing of a mys­tery. My name is Todd Austin. I’ll be your host for this episode.

[musi­cal interlude]

Todd: Episode one: “What is Expe­ri­en­tial Mar­ket­ing?” If you’re not sure what we’re talk­ing about, then this episode is for you.

We’re going to define what we mean by expe­ri­en­tial mar­ket­ing, so that we all have a com­mon plat­form for launch­ing into future episodes about how we can put it into practice.

It seems only fit­ting that we start a show called “Expe­ri­en­tial Mar­ket­ing Today” with a dis­cus­sion about what it means to be an expe­ri­en­tial mar­keter. The term “expe­ri­en­tial mar­ket­ing” is prob­a­bly unfa­mil­iar to a lot of people.

I know it’s unfa­mil­iar to many pro­fes­sional mar­keters, and even those who think they know what it means some­times dis­agree about what that mean­ing is. So it’s appro­pri­ate for us to start off by talk­ing about that and get­ting on the same page together.

Over the next few min­utes, we’ll talk about the ori­gins of the dis­ci­pline, as well as what it means and how it’s prac­ticed. But, before we get into that, let’s lis­ten to the results of a lit­tle infor­mal research project.

We sent one of our own, Ryan Smith, into a uni­ver­sity busi­ness school to inter­view stu­dents about expe­ri­en­tial marketing.

[com­put­er­ized sound effects]

Ryan Smith: What is “expe­ri­en­tial marketing”?

Man 1: It’s mar­ket­ing through expe­ri­ence. It could be using a prod­uct, or actu­ally let­ting the con­sumer use the prod­uct for the expe­ri­ence and mar­ket­ing through those aspects of it.

Woman 1: Expe­ri­en­tial mar­ket­ing is when you’re test­ing dif­fer­ent types of mar­ket­ing to see which ones are most suc­cess­ful in a business.

Man 2: Expe­ri­en­tial mar­ket­ing is face-to-face con­tact with con­sumers, try­ing to mar­ket par­tic­u­lar prod­ucts to these individuals.

Woman 2: I think expe­ri­en­tial mar­ket­ing is mar­ket­ing where they use expe­ri­ence out­side and, maybe, pos­si­bly, exper­i­ments, in order to decide how they’re going to mar­ket and decide if they’re going to con­tinue in that way.

Ryan: What is “expe­ri­en­tial marketing”?

Man 3: When some­body has expe­ri­ence and applies that expe­ri­ence out­side of book knowl­edge. It’s some­thing that’s built in, that they just know how to do it.

Woman 3: I hon­estly have no idea what expe­ri­en­tial mar­ket­ing is, but if I had to guess, I would say it’s just going out and try­ing to fig­ure out things and mar­ket­ing based on what you see and what you expe­ri­ence in life.

Ryan: What is “expe­ri­en­tial marketing”?

Woman 4: It’s where you have to expe­ri­ence dif­fer­ent types of mar­ket­ing to know what works.

[com­put­er­ized sound effects]

Todd: Ryan joins us now to talk about this. Now, Ryan, I guess we should start by mak­ing it clear that this wasn’t a match­book, fly-by-night col­lege, but it was actu­ally a strong busi­ness school in a highly respected university.

So these responses, while, I guess, not sci­en­tific, are prob­a­bly gen­er­ally rep­re­sen­ta­tive of what we might hear on most uni­ver­sity campuses.

Ryan: Absolutely. And one thing I would like to add in here is, not only were they just col­lege stu­dents, the gen­eral, vast vari­ety of them were sopho­more to senior level mar­ket­ing majors.

Todd: So, did you get the sense that this was some­thing they had heard about and just for­got­ten, or was this the first time they had heard this term?

Ryan: Well, after I asked the ques­tions to them, the mar­ket­ing stu­dents were gen­er­ally able to, in their minds, come up with some­thing close to what they would guess, but it always seemed to be a guess and not a “I know this information.”

Todd: Now, these inter­views sound to me like they were all with stu­dents. Is that right?

Ryan: Yes. The ones that I actu­ally recorded were all with col­lege students.

Todd: Did you get a chance to talk to any of the faculty?

Ryan: I did. At one point, I was walk­ing by the vice pres­i­dent of the uni­ver­sity. And it did not feel appro­pri­ate to record his answer, but I just kind of wanted to get a feel from him.

I asked him, “What would you say expe­ri­en­tial mar­ket­ing is?” And he said, “Well, I can’t give you a def­i­n­i­tional term.” But he came very close.

Todd: Well, that’s good.

Ryan: He said, “Mar­ket­ing through expe­ri­ence.” And he had a lot closer answer than any of the stu­dents did.

Todd: Well, Ryan, thanks for chat­ting with us.

Ryan: Well, thank you.

[musi­cal interlude]

Todd: Join­ing us now is John Rober­son. And John, let’s make sure I get this right. Right now, you’re pres­i­dent of Advent. You’ve been there for seven years. That’s an expe­ri­en­tial mar­ket­ing con­sult­ing firm.

Prior to that, you had stints in brand man­age­ment, licensed prop­er­ties, data­base mar­ket­ing, and chief oper­at­ing offi­cer of a home shop­ping net­work. Does that about cover it?

John Rober­son: That’s right. And we’d pre­fer to leave out the prison years.

Todd: I’m not sure I knew about that.

John: Yeah.

Todd: All right. Here is the $64,000 ques­tion. What is expe­ri­en­tial marketing?

John: Todd, as you know — you and I have both read a lot about this topic — there are a lot of peo­ple try­ing to define expe­ri­en­tial mar­ket­ing. They talk about things like multi-sensory mar­ket­ing. And indeed, it is that.

But if you really think about it, even a tele­vi­sion ad is multi-sensory.

Todd: Right.

John: You’re hear­ing it. You’re see­ing it. So let me offer a metaphor that may help us define expe­ri­en­tial mar­ket­ing. Expe­ri­en­tial mar­ket­ing is plac­ing your­self, as an audi­ence mem­ber, into the mar­ket­ing — being a part of the mar­ket­ing, where the mar­ket­ing holds great rel­e­vance for you and great mem­ory for you.

So my anal­ogy is: it’s the dif­fer­ence between watch­ing a kiss on the big screen and being kissed. The dif­fer­ence is, when you’re kissed on your lips, it has great mean­ing, it has great involve­ment, it has great engage­ment, it has great mem­ory for you. Whereas watch­ing a kiss on the big screen is very different.

Todd: So, there’s this angle of par­tic­i­pa­tion that sounds like a crit­i­cal con­cept for expe­ri­en­tial marketing.

John: Cor­rect. Par­tic­i­pa­tion is cer­tainly part of it, but it’s also that that kiss has mean­ing for me. It has rel­e­vance for me.

Todd: OK.

John: Another anal­ogy that may help is the dif­fer­ence between watch­ing the birth of a child on a video and it being the birth of your first child. The mean­ing and the mem­ory and the engage­ment that that has for you goes really deep, because you’re involved in it. It means some­thing to you. Watch­ing the birth of a child on tele­vi­sion doesn’t nec­es­sar­ily have any rel­e­vance or mean­ing for you.

Todd: I’ve read a lot about Dis­ney and expe­ri­ences, and peo­ple use Dis­ney as an exam­ple in expe­ri­en­tial mar­ket­ing a lot. Why is that? What does Dis­ney do that’s so spe­cial, that’s such a great exam­ple to us?

John: Well, one of the things that they do is they know how to exe­cute a pro­gram in great detail.

So, when they are tak­ing one of their licensed prop­er­ties, one of their car­toon char­ac­ters, their ani­ma­tion char­ac­ters, and they exe­cute a the­matic ride, they are doing that in very vivid detail. But they are doing it in a way that’s true, it’s cred­i­ble, and it’s very much a part of the nature of who that char­ac­ter set is.

So, when you ride the Peter Pan ride, it’s so much about the expe­ri­ence and the detail of being involved in that story, and you’re a player in that story. That’s what makes it rel­e­vant for you and a mem­ory for you.

Todd: And that atten­tion to detail extends to things that other amuse­ment parks don’t seem to pay atten­tion to, like the cable strung across the walk­way or the things you can see as you’re on the ride.

John: That’s right. I mean, if you or I were go to a car­ni­val fun house or a haunted house, that mechan­i­cal feel of rolling through the fun house, and a twist and a turn and the fake ghost pop­ping out. That holds no rel­e­vance for us. It’s very low on detail. It’s very low on involvement.

But again, Dis­ney knows how to put us in the story. We’re char­ac­ters in the story.

And so, good brand mar­keters are using expe­ri­en­tial mar­ket­ing to put their audi­ence in the story, to place them in a con­text that holds great mean­ing and rel­e­vance for them.

Todd: OK. Let’s talk for a minute about where expe­ri­en­tial mar­ket­ing comes from. How long has this been around?

John: Well, some schol­ars are say­ing that it is as old as that mir­a­cle cure sales­man that came into town on the back of a stage and stood up on his trunk and espoused the prop­er­ties of his new mir­a­cle cure or elixir. And he may have done that through demon­strat­ing exer­cises of great strength, or he may have shown the strength of his hair or some­thing like that.

Now, a lot of folks equate that guy, that per­son, to the snake oil sales­man. And indeed, he may have been. But what he was doing was very much try­ing to involve his audi­ence in that experience.

Todd: OK.

John: It was more than a demon­stra­tion. He was actu­ally get­ting them to tug on his beard that was oh-so-strong, right? He was get­ting them to try some­thing after drink­ing the elixir. So it could be that expe­ri­en­tial mar­ket­ing goes back that far.

Now, I think you’ve read another descrip­tion of how expe­ri­en­tial mar­ket­ing is tied to soci­ety and our afflu­ence. Why don’t you talk about that?

Todd: Right. A lot of peo­ple tie this term of “expe­ri­ence mar­ket­ing” to a book writ­ten by Pine and Gilmore in the late ‘90s, called, “The Expe­ri­ence Economy.”

That book wasn’t really about mar­ket­ing. It was more about society.

They made the point that we’re in a post­mod­ern world, and a post­mod­ern world with folks with lots of money. The com­bi­na­tion of those things has changed the way that we process infor­ma­tion and make decisions.

Twenty years ago, our task as mar­keters was, “Let’s make a log­i­cal appeal. Let’s show fea­tures and ben­e­fits. Let’s show how one prod­uct is bet­ter than another.” Pine and Gilmore, I think, con­vinc­ingly demon­strate that that doesn’t work well today.

Now, in post­mod­ern soci­ety, we are look­ing for these authen­tic expe­ri­ences. When we do a birth­day party for our chil­dren, we’re not doing like our grand­par­ents may have done in the ‘50s, where they had the com­modi­ties on-hand. They hand-made a cake.

We’re not doing like our par­ents may have done in the ‘70s, where they bought a Betty Crocker mix and baked a cake. We’re not even doing like par­ents did in the ‘80s, where they bought a cake at the local gro­cery store.

Instead, we are buy­ing an expe­ri­ence for our chil­dren, like at an inflat­a­bles party or a gym­nas­tics party. The amount we’re will­ing to spend is much greater than those prior gen­er­a­tions. But we do it because we want that experience.

John: So the birth­day is now much more than a cake com­prised of very basic and com­modi­tized ingre­di­ents. The birth­day is now an expe­ri­ence that cre­ates this larger than life mem­ory or event, and the cake is one element.

Todd: That’s right.

John: Big difference.

Todd: Let’s talk for a sec­ond about why some­one should care about expe­ri­en­tial mar­ket­ing. One side could say, “Is this just a gim­mick? Is it a trend? Is it a fad? Why can’t we just keep on going like we’ve gone?”

John: Well, I’m going to offer as evi­dence — and you tease me about this, folks around here at the office tease me about this — my inbox is jammed with email.

Todd: Right.

John: But it’s really reflec­tive of what a lot of folks are expe­ri­enc­ing. We’ve both read in busi­ness pub­li­ca­tions of peo­ple unplug­ging their email and killing an account and start­ing over.

Todd: Right.

John: The point is that we have so much stim­uli com­ing at us. Now, over­lay that with email solic­i­ta­tions, tele­phone solic­i­ta­tions, direct mail solic­i­ta­tions. We’re get­ting solic­i­ta­tions on our Black­berry and Palm. We’re get­ting instant mes­sages from folks that we care about.

Folks are pio­neer­ing ways to instant mes­sage you. “Mad Money,” from CNBC, instant mes­sages me now after every episode. Add to that the fact that we may have lis­tened to satel­lite radio on the way to a loca­tion. There’s this incred­i­ble flood of stimuli.

So, what we’re see­ing is this huge shift — it’s not a trend; I believe it’s a shift — in the way peo­ple are mar­ket­ing, so that they can find folks with whom they can cre­ate this level of engage­ment, because brands have always been about an emo­tion and an emo­tional hook because that emo­tional con­nec­tion to a brand is what enables some­one to make a choice.

That doesn’t just apply to business-to-business brands; it applies to business-to-consumer brands as well. And so, what I think we’re see­ing is this shift in the econ­omy, to where peo­ple are try­ing to find more effec­tive ways to market.

Todd: We’ve both seen that the tra­di­tional ways we’ve done mar­ket­ing in the past are becom­ing less influ­en­tial on us. I’m not as likely to take action based on an ad in a pub­li­ca­tion or on TV.

But if I have an expe­ri­ence with some­thing myself, or if some­one that I know has an expe­ri­ence and then they tell me about it, that car­ries a lot of weight with me. That makes me want to try it myself.

John: I agree with that. And tech­nol­ogy is both the bane of our exis­tence and also the enabler of filtering.

We have all these ads that are hap­pen­ing on tele­vi­sion, if you ever get the chance to watch tele­vi­sion. But we also have TiVo, and we can fast-forward through ads, right?

Todd: Right.

John: We have spam fil­ters, and we can fast-forward through… So we have tech­nol­ogy, but we also have tech­nol­ogy that is say­ing, “How can I limit the amount of adver­tis­ing that’s get­ting to you?” So it’s almost as though the tech­nol­ogy is work­ing against itself.

Todd: Let’s talk for a few min­utes about some con­crete exam­ples of expe­ri­en­tial mar­ket­ing and prac­tice, because it’s one thing to talk about the the­ory, but it could be help­ful to give some examples.

John: OK. I’ll talk about Altoids and the launch of their chocolate-covered mints. You talk about coffee.

Todd: OK.

John: They seem to go together, right?

Todd: OK.

John: You need a mint after cof­fee. But we’ll start with the mints.

So, to launch its choco­late mints, Altoids cre­ated a hand­ful — let’s say a half a dozen — popup stores across the coun­try, in var­i­ous key mar­kets. But it wasn’t just, “Let’s hand out sam­ples of our prod­uct.” That would seem so packaged-good company-like.

Todd: Right.

John: And Altoids, as you know, the very nature of its brand is it’s retro, but it’s irrev­er­ent. It’s got this edge to it. All their adver­tis­ing has had that. It’s this time­less, edgy brand, right?

So what they did is they cre­ated these pop-up stores to cre­ate this expe­ri­ence to draw peo­ple in. And so, on Valentine’s Day, they pro­posed launch­ing these pop-up stores in six dif­fer­ent markets.

They cre­ated a choco­latier, a store that you could walk into. You could try the choco­late Altoids. You could also have a cup of coffee.

And while you were there you could also shop and be immersed in the Altoids brand. So the wall­pa­per was very Vic­to­rian and retro, but if you looked very closely it was also very provoca­tive and very edgy.

And there were post­cards that one could send to their favorite valen­tine, but rather than it being a Hallmark-type greet­ing, it was a much more sar­cas­tic and irrev­er­ent greeting.

And so this was all part of the Altoids brand. It was all tied to the Altoids expe­ri­ence. Now the irony was that the pop-up stores didn’t exist in that city block two weeks ear­lier, and after the expe­ri­ence — it only lasted one week — it didn’t exist two weeks after.

But what they were try­ing to do was find influ­encers, fault lead­ers, to come in, be exposed to the choco­la­teer expe­ri­ence, try the prod­uct, and of course then tell their friends. Because their emo­tional con­nec­tion to that expe­ri­ence — they were in the experience.

Todd: That “tell your friends” part of it may be impor­tant for us to talk about too, before I talk about the cof­fee exam­ple. Because I think one neg­a­tive thought peo­ple may have in expe­ri­en­tial mar­ket­ing is, “Well how can you pos­si­bly reach all the peo­ple with expe­ri­en­tial mar­ket­ing that you can reach with a tele­vi­sion ad?”

John: I would say that in addi­tion to them telling peo­ple, it’s a lit­tle sur­real to tell your friends, “Now, two weeks ago a choco­late store didn’t exist here, but a week ago…trust me, I went to one here.” That’s storybook-like in itself.

Add to that though, the fact that they’re telling their friends about this sur­real expe­ri­ence where they got free sam­ples of the mints. And they got a free cup of coffee.

And then what hap­pens Todd, is the press is mak­ing a story out of the expe­ri­ence. Because the press then is talk­ing about this choco­late store and the lines are wrapped around the block. Because do peo­ple really give away things for free any­more? And what’s inside there that’s so provocative?

So some­times the expe­ri­ence is very much about cre­at­ing that buzz. But this is not just buzz for the sake of buzz. It’s not a car­ni­val tac­tic. It’s some­thing that’s very authen­tic to the nature of this brand.

Todd: Star­bucks, who of course has the money to do pop-up stores too, chose to do some­thing on a much smaller scale which, I think, gives hope to folks with shal­lower pock­ets than Altoids and Starbucks.

Around the hol­i­days they ran a street expe­ri­en­tial cam­paign, where they had cars run­ning around major met­ro­pol­i­tan areas with Star­bucks cups on a mag­net attached to the top of the car. They were wait­ing for peo­ple to stop them and flag them down and say, “Hey! You left your cof­fee on top of your car!”

Todd: So it looked like a cof­fee cup had been left by a taxi cus­tomer on top of the taxi.

John: Exactly. So when some­one would stop them and be a good samar­i­tan, they would reward that per­son with coupons for them and a friend. And of course that gen­er­ated word of mouth because it was so clever, but it also led to some press cov­er­age like you mentioned.

Todd: Right, because these cof­fee cups were rid­ing around all over town on top of taxis, and the thought of reward­ing a good samar­i­tan, some­one that would take the time to warn you that the cup of coffee…

John: Around the hol­i­day season.

Todd: Yeah, yeah. It all fits very authen­tic to the brand.

John: Yes.

Todd: Let’s talk now about how some­one can get started in this. We’ve talked about big cam­paigns and small. What’s the best way for a com­pany that’s not in expe­ri­en­tial mar­ket­ing now to get started?

John: First of all; it’s not just for For­tune 100 com­pa­nies or For­tune 500 com­pa­nies. Any­body can do expe­ri­en­tial marketing.

If the elixir sales­man of old could do it, we can do it now. The ques­tion is, what are we doing from exist­ing mar­ket­ing strate­gies that can be enhanced and, if it were enhanced, where could we improve our return on the invest­ment by cre­at­ing an experience?

A mar­ket­ing ini­tia­tive that takes our audi­ence even more deeply into their asso­ci­a­tion with our brand. To cre­ate some­thing that’s very mem­o­rable, it’s very relevant.

It may be that you look at your front lobby. We’ve done a num­ber of clients’ front lob­bies. We’ve worked with them to improve their front lobby in a way that’s more engag­ing to folks who are com­ing to visit and do due dili­gence before doing busi­ness with them.

And so maybe you look at that front lobby and say, “Is that an expe­ri­ence that we can draw some­one into and make it very mem­o­rable and per­sua­sive for them?”

You look at your trade show strat­egy. Maybe you already are going to an exist­ing flight or event sched­ule of trade shows, and you say, “Is there a way that we can improve our effec­tive­ness by being more memorable?”

And that doesn’t just take place on the show floor. It may take place in asso­ci­a­tion with that trade show at the same time off the show floor. It may take place in the aisle. There are all dif­fer­ent kinds of ways to improve that strategy.

Or it may be an event that you hold with your exist­ing users or cus­tomers or dis­trib­u­tors. Or your own sales force, so that your mes­sage is received in a much more engag­ing and rel­e­vant way and so that your audi­ence is very much a part of that experience.

Todd: So, to sum up what you’re say­ing there, a key way to start is just to look at what you’re already doing and see how you can change it.

John: See how you can change it and see how you can improve it again. We use two analo­gies there, two anec­dotes in Star­bucks and Altoids. Both of them have great mar­ket­ing. But they took that strat­egy fur­ther by cre­at­ing these expe­ri­ences that drew that audi­ence in and cre­ated this memory.

[music]

We’ve described expe­ri­en­tial mar­ket­ing using metaphor and exam­ple. Here’s the def­i­n­i­tion that we use. Expe­ri­en­tial mar­ket­ing con­nects audi­ences with the authen­tic nature of a brand through par­tic­i­pa­tion in per­son­ally rel­e­vant, cred­i­ble and mem­o­rable encounters.

Whereas tra­di­tional mar­ket­ing is focused on mass com­mu­ni­ca­tion using ratio­nal, left-brain directed per­sua­sion, expe­ri­en­tial mar­ket­ing focuses on mak­ing a per­son­al­ized con­nec­tion using emo­tional, right-brain directed involvement.

Well, that wraps up our first show. We hope you walk away with a bet­ter under­stand­ing of what expe­ri­en­tial mar­ket­ing is.

If you have ques­tions or com­ments we wel­come those. You can send those to us at: feedback@experientialmarketingtoday.com.

You can also visit our web­site which is www.experientialmarketingtoday.com. There you’ll find show notes for today’s shows which will include links to any of the resources we’ve men­tioned as well as a full tran­script of the show.

On the next episode we’ll pick up where we left off, and we’ll talk about how you can trans­form your trade show mar­ket­ing and do an expe­ri­en­tial tool.

Thank you again for join­ing us, we’ll see you next time.

Announcer: Thanks for lis­ten­ing to Expe­ri­en­tial Mar­ket­ing Today.

[music]

Authored By Advent

Advent partners with organizations to help them visually express differentiation.