Experiential Marketing

How to Get Customers to Sense, Feel, Think, Act, and Relate to Your Company and Brands

By Bernd Schmitt

At Through the Loop we believe that we have now entered the Third Age of Branding. One aspect of this is the development of brand experiences. This move beyond associations based on brand imagery (driven by advertising, primarily) to the development of a branded presence that surrounds the consumer and connects with them in a more meaningful way. However, while some companies have been highly successful in developing brand experience, and some have based their whole business around the concept, it is an area that still appears to poorly understood. Consequently, Bernd Schmitt's Experiential Marketing looked like it could address this and set some ground rules for building experience into marketing. However, this is not the case.

It should be noted that the book is interesting to read and is thought provoking. There is a lot of interesting work here. The main problem is that it hardly addresses experiential marketing. This is a very good book on how to write advertising copy that connects more directly with the consumer. Almost all of the book relates to the different ways copy can be written or products can "look and feel." There is almost no mention of what are generally viewed as key experiential elements such as live events or how appropriately trained staff can bring the brand alive. As such, the "perfect" experiential brand Disney does not generate any meaningful coverage. 

The effect of this is that the book is misleading in suggesting that experiential marketing is about advertising copy that is written to connect with the senses. Traditional advertising may help to support experiential marketing but it has moved to this from from its leading role of the past in developing brand imagery. However, where Schmitt is correct is that experiential marketing is a way of reaching all the consumers' senses. Clearly, there are better ways to do this than advertising. The very best experiential marketing appears to use a range of marketing communications tools to reach all the senses, bring the brand alive and ensure that the consumer is immersed in the experience. Schmitt's approach is useful and does help to understand how the senses should be engaged but by confining the approach, largely, to advertising, it tends to miss the point. He is correct in that experiential marketing moves the brand away from features and benefits but he does restrict his communications tools and, in doing so, can only produce a fraction of the experience that could be generated by a wider understanding and use of different ways of connecting with the consumer. 

Having said that, this book is a useful aid to developing experiential marketing. It does help to consider some of the different concepts that experience covers and provides some interesting case studies. The point missing is that many of these brands covered did use a wide or at least novel range of communications channels and did achieve consumer immersion. Their success was built on more than television and press advertising and this fact does not come across in the book.

Review by Martin Payne