So what is “Experiential Marketing”?, Is it just event management, just at four times the price? Well sometimes “yes”, but done properly most certainly, “no”. Experiential Marketing has risen out of the ashes of the falling efficiencies of traditional media and the soaring ability of consumers at being able to filter out traditional passive media messages. Consumers receive on average 3,000 branded messages every day, they notice only 80 and actually react to about 10. It’s really hard to cut-through!

With more advertisers, yelling in more places consumers’ collective response has been simple – stop listening. Enter experiential marketing. The premise is a dialogue vs a monologue or tirade of information. Enter into a two-way conversation with consumers and your relationship with them will be far more rewarding (for both of you).

So we’re talking about events, activations – basically any physical opportunity for a consumer to interact with a created branded experience. At the heart of it are normally , “brand ambassadors”. These are the next step up from just hot women, in tight T-shirts, giving out balloons (traditionally what ‘events’ firms provided). Brand ambassadors are generally presentable, reasonably intelligent (as the individual brand requires) and versed in the sort of conversations and questions a consumer might like to have around the product.

For brands like Nokia, a well-versed brand ambassador giving you a demonstration of a phone is priceless (and maybe a little pricey); compared to a 2D or monologue form of communication, an experiential activation is an opportunity to convert interest into loyalty and even the holy grail- advocacy.

The key components of an effective experiential activation are

ANTICIPATION: making people aware, excited and informed of an activation.

EXPERIENCE: making sure people have a memorable, informative and valuable branded engagement. It’s a great idea to let consumers choose their level of interaction and engagement with the brand.

PROROGATION: successfully empowering the person you’ve interacted with to act on interest, continue the relationship and share their experience is the mark of a strategically sound experiential activation.

The rule of consumers engagement is “time IS money”. Consumers are happy to give their time AND contact information (what brands want) IF a brand is willing to trade something for it. Normally there is the EXPERIENTIAL HONEY POT- the attention getting, free experience consumers can engage in/with. It could be a drink on a hot day, a free ride on a ferris wheel, a massage at a music festival, a game to play- whatever is RELEVANT & REMARKABLE to the occasion. The tried and tested principles of promotions come into play here with major prize: cash, cars, holidays and money-can’t-buy underpinned with guaranteed redemptions of exclusive content or some sort of freemuim.

The game for any brand is building relationships. The essence of this is an initial great impression and then consistency. Stats show if you’re not in contact 13 times a year- guess what? you’re NOT considered to be in contact. So, for making a great first impression or repositioning yourself, Experiential Marketing is THE way to go. It forces you to be selective about WHO you REALLY need to be talking with, when they might want to talk with you, and lets you offer fewer people a deeper and more rewarding experience. It’s a brilliant opportunity for data capture and getting people to opt-in for a relationship that can then be cost effectively managed on-line. Experiential marketing companies that don’t include or recommend this or brands that don’t act and manage the data effectively are wasting their money.

Experiential marketing (combined with a strategically based media campaign, targeted around “Tipping Point “ principles http://www.gladwell.com/tippingpoint ) is an effective arrow to have in any marketer’s quiver.