Experiential Marketing - companies get personal

 Experiential marketing is something exciting that is happening in advertising now that gets the consumer completely involved in the advertising process. Companies are no longer only flashing an advertisement to a consumer, but taking their hand and giving them a lasting experience that they’ll always remember.

Experiential marketing can take many forms, but basically just means that you are providing the audience with a real-life experience of the brand, product, or company in the hopes to create a lasting impression. But what is an experience? It’s not really something I can write about, it’s something you must see. So here are a few examples of this type of advertising in action:

The following is the experiencial advertising promotion for Seat Technology that saves gasoline when driving your vehicle. Whenever the vehicle stops, the car will convert that unused energy into potential energy to be used later – saving the driver money on gas. In order to show this in a personally unique way, they created a campaign in which taxi fare in cars with this technology reduces every time the driver brakes. The consumer can physically in real time see that they are saving money and learn about the product in a fun and personal way instead of hearing a string of facts.

Another example is a campaign that I had shown in a previous post about Coca-Cola’s guerilla marketing techniques. In this example, they are not attemption to sell the consumer on the details of a product, but rather have them experience the brand character. In this segment you’ll see the coke “hug” machine, in which you can only get a soda once you give the machine a big squeeze. Hugging is a universal sign of friendship and love, which is a strong factor in Coca-Cola’s brand identity.

The entire idea behind advertising is to create a lasting positive impression on the consumer, and as Maya Angelou said, “People will forget what you said. People will forget what you did. But people will never forget how you made them feel.”