Savvy marketers know that experiences are one of the most powerful marketing tools. But why do they work? Experiential marketing is fun; it engages with people, makes people remember your brand, and, if you’re lucky, it will yield a healthy number of future customers. Experiential marketing campaigns can be an excellent way to build brand awareness and customer loyalty while simultaneously being a lot of fun to execute.
Planning a lucrative marketing campaign is easier when you understand why your customers think in a certain way or make the decisions they do. If you’re hitting a specific target audience, you need to know who will most likely buy your product. If you’re writing a new blog post, you need to know the content that will connect with your readers. The more you understand why people gravitate towards an experience, the easier it is to create one they’ll struggle to forget.
Here we’ll delve into why the experiential channel is so effective, the underlying psychology behind these tactics, and how we, as marketers, can use them to our advantage.
Experiential Learning
Why do we remember some experiences and not others? For an emotionally significant or shocking event, it makes sense that we wouldn’t easily forget it. Since the 1970s, psychologists have used the term flashbulb memories to describe what happens when we think we remember an experience in great detail, even several decades later.
People worldwide can likely still recollect precisely where they were, what they were doing and whom they were talking to when they first heard about 9/11 or the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. Although it’s been proven that flashbulb memories are unlikely to be as accurate as we think they are, or in some cases even completely inaccurate, the shock of the experience can render the essence of the memory to remain locked in our minds forever.
In 1984, educational theorist David Kolb published his experiential learning theory “Learning is the process whereby knowledge is created through the transformation of experience” (Kolb, 1984). In a nutshell, it means to ‘learn by doing.’ Physically experiencing something new can help increase the chance of us absorbing and retaining that information. We can use this concept in experiential marketing.
Creating an experience that evokes an emotional response may subconsciously encourage consumers to feel a connection to our brand. By interacting with our target audience in an engaging physical setting, we can leave a lasting impression on potential customers and improve the likelihood of them remembering us. The more we learn about the experiences likely to stick with our target audience, the better marketers we become.
Frequency Illusion
Ever comes across something for the first time and then start seeing or hearing it everywhere? That’s frequency illusion.
Take a word you haven’t come across before, and suddenly you hear it everywhere. It was there the whole time, only you didn’t notice it until you noticed it, and then you started to notice it. The frequency of the word didn’t increase, but your awareness of its existence did.
Experiential marketers can try to recreate this phenomenon in their campaigns. After stumbling across your activation, a prospect notices your brand name for the first time. Later, they keep seeing your brand everywhere. It might be that you’re retargeting them (clever marketing), but it also might be frequency illusion in action; they didn’t notice you until they started to notice you. Either way, now that you’ve got their attention, you want to maximize it.
The key here is connecting your events and experiential marketing to your other marketing channels. You can only do this well if you successfully capture live events' data. Synching experiential with your other marketing channels through software and using experiential data to better understand your customers will improve your campaigns.
By utilizing all the marketing channels at your disposal, you can ensure prospective customers who engage with your experiences don’t forget you even after leaving the event.
The Cool Factor
What makes some marketing campaigns inherently cooler than others? It’s hard to quantify, but consumers know cool when they see it, even if they can’t explain it.
Red Bull may not be everyone's drink of choice, but in 2012, millions watched as Felix Baumgartner successfully jumped back down to our planet from 39,045 metres. Watching the jump might not make people want to drink Red Bull any more than before, but many have probably never forgotten that experience and its connection to the company that sponsored it.
It’s brand awareness at its finest.
The ‘cool’ factor is subjective and changes over time, but when an experience has that special little spark of intrigue, it can hold enough power to attract thousands. Suppose you can find that elusive factor and bring it to your experiential marketing campaigns. In that case, you might encourage people who would never usually have noticed you to gravitate to your events. And if it’s cool enough, they might also tell their friends to come.
FOMO and the Principle of Social Proof
Most people have, at least once in their lives, felt the familiar fear of missing out on an experience that someone else is having — a phenomenon that has intensified since the dawn of social media.
Before anyone had even coined a term to describe FOMO, we had social psychologist Dr. Robert Cialdini and his Principle of Social Proof. In his 1984 book, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, Cialdini explained the techniques that persuade people to take specific actions. His “6 Principles of Persuasion” are still used to increase conversions in marketing campaigns today. The idea behind social proof is that humans are more likely to do something if others are already doing it. When crowds of other people buy a popular product (like AirPods) or attend a popular event (like Coachella), it makes us feel like we have to do the same or we’re missing out. This social proof is often called the “wisdom of the crowd.” In experiential marketing terms, if we can create an experience that makes the people who are not there jealous of those who are, then we’re doing a great job.
We regularly see Cialdini’s social proof principle used in online marketing (“Join 25,000 others that downloaded this ebook”, etc.). Still, the wisdom of the crowd concept can be particularly effective in experiential marketing. By capitalizing on FOMO and creating experiences that people naturally want to share on social media, you can develop a winning experiential strategy that could be exponentially beneficial.
The Principles of Reciprocity and Scarcity
Cialdini’s first Principle of Persuasion is Reciprocity, the idea that humans are more likely to treat others as they’ve been treated. If someone does you a favour, you are more likely to want to return the favour in the future. This technique is also commonly used in online marketing campaigns. When you regularly offer your reader content that is informative and beneficial to their lives but ask for nothing in return, you’re hoping they’re more likely to become a customer in the future, or at the very least a, subscriber to your blog.
In experiential marketing, you can offer your target audience something for free and hope they become a paying customer because they feel indebted to you at some point. Whether you let them try out your product in a physical setting or offer them a sample to take home, you’re providing an experience and building brand awareness without asking for anything in return.
Cialdini also tells us that people are more likely to want something when it’s in short supply. The idea behind his scarcity principle is that products or experiences suddenly become more attractive when they are limited, something that we regularly see on travel websites. When you’re searching for a hotel room or a plane ticket, and you see that there’s only one left, this is scarcity in all of its glory.
By creating invite-only experiences with a limited guest list or a small number of sample giveaways, you can play on the psychological principle of scarcity and entice people to come to your event before they lose their only chance.
The Propinquity Effect
In psychology, the propinquity effect is the idea that the more we are exposed to someone through close physical proximity, the more inclined we are to like them. In marketing terms, when we are familiar with a brand, we are more likely to feel connected.
We can maximize this effect in our experiential marketing campaigns. When consumers interact with our brand physically, the propinquity effect makes them feel like they have built a relationship with us. People don’t want traditional advertising when they can experience brands on their terms. Consumers expect to interact with their preferred brands and products in unique and captivating ways, so the more opportunities we give them to interact with us, the stronger the connection to our brand will become.
The Future of Marketing
Marketing will be defined by the generations that have grown up with the internet and social media at their fingertips. As the spending power of Millennials continues to rise and Generation Z enters their prime spending years, these are the consumers that will determine how we, as marketers interact with them in this decade and beyond. Technology that hasn’t been invented yet will change the way we market, and as that happens, consumer expectations will mirror those changes. As virtual and augmented reality become more commonplace, consumers will expect more interaction, personalization and unique flavours to their experiences than ever before.
By considering the psychology behind experiential marketing when you plan your campaigns, you can create unique experiences that your target audience will scramble to be part of. Gaining a deeper understanding of why experiential marketing is so effective should help you amplify your strategy as you navigate the fascinating marketing landscape of the future.