Where does your attention go when you’re travelling from A-B? People rarely look up or down when they are on the move. So how is your message being seen? When people are rushing through their daily commute, they are rarely paying attention to advertising messages on billboards or on the floor. In addition, within the current cluttered media landscape, consumers are saturated with more marketing messages than ever before. Therefore, our question is: how are you drawing attention to your brand?
Nowadays, consumers are savvy and very familiar with most advertising tactics. Armed with this knowledge, they can actively resist marketing efforts and are therefore immune to many traditional techniques. In our article ‘Proof that media is less effective’ we commented that brands that “stand out” and “get chosen” are the ones that speak volumes to their audiences. These brands not only succeed in entertaining consumers, but also create a relationship with them.
As new channels of communication emerge from ever evolving digital technologies, brands need to find new ways to grab the attention of consumers and get their message across. Consequently, the challenge for marketers is to create new strategies to reach the consumer on a personal level, engaging people in ways that they find to be informative and entertaining.
Rather than focusing on exposing big brand messages to a mass audience, which may risk alienating your consumers, experiential marketing activities can help you create a direct relationship with consumers. By using the best strategy to meet your objectives, an experiential campaign can create greater brand visibility when people are on the move, getting your message across in the most innovative of ways.
If planned strategically, you can challenge convention and use creativity to make the experience sensational and relevant, and therefore engage your audience on a one-to-one level. Hotcow’s experiential campaign for Powwownow exemplifies this perfectly. With three celebrities participating in a 24 hour conference call whilst lounging on beds in the centre of major London stations, commuters couldn’t help but take a look. This demonstrates the attention-grabbing nature of experiential marketing, bombarding consumers’ usually mundane commute to work.
What are your thoughts? Do you agree that traditional media is less effective? Tweet us @Hotcow.
Hotcow’s mission is to help brands understand the power of “experience-based marketing” and offer expertise in how to develop, plan and execute campaigns in the right way to get the right results, while showing that every pound spent is measurable. If you are looking for real results for your brand, contact us.