What is experiential marketing?
Experiential marketing is a marketing strategy that engages consumers in a participatory, sensory, or often, hands-on way through tangible marketing materials, and can be especially effective at demonstrating values as well as product features and benefits.
Like its name suggests, experiential marketing invites an audience to experience a brand, often incorporating active product demonstrations, sampling, or seeding accompanied by an expression of brand identity. Whereas traditional marketing avenues like advertising enable brands to declare what they stand for, experiential marketing enables the consumer to discover this for themselves.
Due to consumers’ active participation in experiential marketing activities, these strategies are highly effective at creating lasting memories of and associations with a brand, connecting with consumers on an emotional level. This results in higher brand recall, preference, and when executed well, loyalty.
More than just events.
While this field is highly event-driven, the companies that are strongest at experiential marketing take every IRL consumer interaction as an opportunity to flex this muscle. The most successful experiential brands actively seek ways to inspire emotion in every consumer touchpoint, or to convey a brand value, attribute or property. Experiential marketing can touch, influence and help shape activities like retail store/environment design, influencer and PR outreach, packaging, merchandising, sales, and customer service.
Experiential marketing tactics can include pop-up stores, guerrilla marketing, brand partnerships, press mailers, PR stunts, and can layer into integrated marketing campaigns. As such, experiential marketing is a highly creative and innovative specialization, often positioning a brand in previously uncharted territory. A strong experiential marketing professional will be a master of event management, but also capable of big-picture strategic thinking, recognizing and forging unique opportunities, and bringing ideas to life.