Live brand experiences require specialist experiential skills, demanding knowledge and understanding of exactly what makes your consumers tick, as well as a large sprinkling of creativity to invite and encourage consumer participation.
In today’s cluttered marketing landscape, producing a live campaign is a bold, daring move, that can make your brand shine out amongst competitors. As one of the most innovative and unique elements of the marketing mix, creative experiential marketing can be integrated into your branded campaign to great success. However, the key to a successful live experience is the ability to invent new ways for people to interact with your brand. Simultaneously, you should ensure that your brand promise is delivered at every point of consumer interaction.
Experiential marketing recognises the importance of rational and emotional consumer attributes, which make pleasurable experiences pertinent. Creating a live marketing campaign is not just about coming up with the next best idea; in reality, the success of a campaign relies on distinctive elements of creativity, coupled with sensory cues, to help consumers identify with your brand.
Key factors in live experiences
Here at Hotcow, we specialise in live, creative experiential events which make brands shine, engaging consumers through captivating and unforgettable personalised experiences. The resounding qualities that can be identified within Hotcow’s marketing campaigns are the use of creativity and a truly unique ‘wow’ factor, which have the combined ability to stop consumers in their tracks.
Hotcow’s recent experiential campaign to launch the LG 3D smartphone is a perfect live marketing example. When testing the various new features of the phone, we felt that it was extremely fun and playful and loved the realistic, personalised 3D experience. Therefore ‘Playing by Yourself Just Got Better’ arouse as the perfect campaign tagline and overall philosophy. We created the first 3D smartphone ‘Play Hub’ to give people a chance to interact with the main features of the phone – 3D movies, 3D games and 3D photo – in a fully immersive and engaging environment.
In our experience, when planning a unique live marketing activity, there are certain essential factors that require consideration. Firstly, the accurate and precise identification of your target consumer base is extremely important. Additionally, experiential specialists must understand how consumers interact with brands and what they are looking for in terms of an experience in a dynamic environment. Every interaction should be viewed as an opportunity to create meaningful two-way conversations with your consumers and, ultimately, the overall campaign must be representative of both the brand and target market.
Creative tactics to enhance your live marketing campaign
In order to apply creative genius to that all important out-of-the-box experience, it is imperative that creativity runs throughout every element of your campaign. Nothing is too small to be considered with an innovative eye, from uniforms to flooring to leaflet dispensers and everything in between. A creative flair should encapsulate the brand, pushing the boundaries in order to bring your product/service to life.
Technological platforms are a very memorable and distinctive method of implementing creativity into a campaign. Technology can be integrated to inspire people to interact, and enhance talkability surrounding your brand, which positively affect consumers’ perceptions about your brand. At Hotcow, we love Celebrating Creativity in brands, highlighting some great examples of experiential inspiration from around the world. In our weekly creative blog posts, we identify a distinctive trend of fantastic new technology within recent campaigns, including the use of touch screens, augmented reality and light projections to name a few.
Ultimately, as recently discussed in our blog article ‘The integration challenge: Why do companies struggle to create successful integrated campaigns?’, whatever the marketing platforms used within a campaign, consistency is a vital element that should run between all touchpoints. Furthermore, behind every successful live brand event is a carefully crafted message, which should be communicated in a creative learning environment. This will ultimately form a memorable experience for consumers, above and beyond the basic product/service features.
Hotcow is a multi-award winning brand engagement agency specialising in experiential marketing. Our mission is simple: 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. For more information or a free consultation contact us.