Experiential Marketing: Secrets, Strategies, and Success Stories from the World's Greatest Brands

The world of experiential marketing books isn't that big, but what's out there tends to be long on theory and short on practice. Even then, case studies tend to be too out of reach without 7-figure budgets. This book is a standout for plain-spoken, grounded examples that might actually be useful to marketers and business leaders of any size.

Finally, a book on experiential marketing for actual marketers. From the first chapter, you are hooked. The perspective on the rise and fall of the different channels of the marketing mix is well done--and the section reasoning that the installation of modern CMOs essentially triggered the demise of advertising is refreshing and interesting. Great, quick, worthwhile read that gives the "full story" on experiential marketing.

I really enjoyed this book. The book gave me insight and ideas to create and grow my brand. Some examples were a bit extreme but I tailored it to suit my needs. A MUST buy book if you are into marketing or having problems connecting with customers.

The book is really informative.

Until I read Bernd Schmitt’s classic, Experiential Marketing: How to Get Customers to Sense, Feel, Think, Act, Relate (1999), I had not fully understood and appreciated how and why the five senses could have a significant impact on the purchase decision process. Almost twenty years later, as Kerry Smith and Dan Hanover point out in their book with the same title, “As a marketer, the need to cut through noise has never been more important – or more difficult. In today’s tune-out culture. Where the interruptive marketing strategies of yesterday have been rendered almost useless by consumers who can now tune you out, our brands need more than a catchy jingle, an amusing TV spot, or a big budget to be noticed. Being flashy, sexy, or loud no longer equates to a return on investment. Marketers have no one to blame but themselves for their current predicament.” They recommend a non-traditional approach to resolving that predicament by taking another path, “one that taps into the core of our human DNA and virtually forces target audiences to stop, take, notice, and participate. We call this the ‘pull’ approach, and it is the central tenet of experiential marketing, a powerful strategy used more and more by leading brands to create true customer engagement that delivers measurable results.” I agree with them that, in its simplest form, experiential marketing is nothing more than a highly evolved form of corporate storytelling. “But while the premise appears simple — combine a brand message, elements of interactivity, a targeted audience, and deliver it in a live setting to create a defined outcome — successful experiences are both art and science. Embracing experiential marketing requires a new way of thinking about marketing, creativity, and the role of media in the overall mix.” Experiential marketing has grown quickly in recent years and an ever-increasing number of organizations are adopting it. Why? Because Smith and Hanover have no single answer, they suggest seven: It carries the strength of many; it’s unstoppable, the first single converter, and it’s an accelerant; it drives lifetime value; and it’s an engagement multiplier as well the marketing mix’s charger. They discuss each in detail and cross-reference to them throughout their narrative. These are among the dozens of passages of greatest interest and value to me, also listed to suggest the scope of Smith and Hanover’s coverage in Chapters One to Six: o The Experience R/Evolution (Pages 3-7) o Steve Heyer on seven factors that are changing the marketing paradigm (9-10) o Seven reasons to explain experiential market’s rapid growth from “almost out of nowhere” (13-14) o The Science Behind Relationships (19-24) o Connection with an audience (26-34) o Engagement control (34-42) o Experiential: The new currency of marketing (49-55) o Creating customer conversion (55-62) o Shareable customer experiences (67-72) o Exempla of “relatable” (77-81) o Exempla of (81-83) o Exempla of connectable customer experiences (85-88) o Exempla of flexible customer experiences (88-91) o Engagement of target audience (91-94) o Engagement of believable audience (95-98) o Creating a Wired Experience (100-115) o Creating Living Stories (118-120) o Building an Experience (120-131) OK, so how to convert to an Experience Brand? Kerry Smith and Dan Hanover recommend a seven-step process: Step 1 - Identify Your Fronts: “Narrow your marketing focus around the key ‘fronts’ that you will use as platforms from which to build partnerships and programs.” Step 2 - Find and Align Partners: Now “evaluate and select the partner properties you will work with to create and execute your experiential programs.” Step 3 - Select the Right Agency: “Your particular circumstances will dictate which type of agency or mix of agencies0 is right for your organization, but we offer this word of caution: experiential marketing is marketing without a net.” Step 4 - Fix Your Rep Process: “A key characteristic of an effective RFP process is the ability to best align a marketer’s needs and goals with agency capabilities.” Step 5 - Beef Up Your Internal Teams: “It will be the responsibility of your internal champions [at other levels and in other areas of your company] to manage your external parts and enforce discipline and alignment around your experiential goals.” Step 6 - Create Value: “Your goal should be not just to create value, but to create [begin italics] meaningful [end italics] for your company and your customers…Successful experiential marketers check themselves at every touch point to ensure that each component of a program delivers an enhanced customer experience.” Step 7 - Improve Lower-Funnel Results: “”It’s critical that you focus on your lower-tunnel results. This is where you will link participation to business impact. It’s arguably the most important area to plan for, and the planning should begin at the outset of your campaign development. These steps are based on lessons learned from best-practices in organizations in which their marketing mix was reshaped by execution of “the ultimate customer engagement strategy.” How to complete each step is thoroughly explained in Chapter Ten. Obviously, no brief commentary such as mine can possibly do full justice to the information. insights, and counsel that Kerry Smith and Dan Hanover provide in abundance. However, I hope that I have at least indicated why I think so highly of their book. I agree with them that experiential is not for every organization. That is for business leaders to determine. However, given the fact that competition in today’s global marketplace is more volatile, more uncertain, more complex, and more ambiguous than at any prior time that I can remember, maximizing customer engagement in the purchase decision process is imperative and experiential marketing can probably do that better than any other approach, at least that I know of.

This is not just a book. It's a useful tool. In fact, it's so useful, I really wish I could have read it a long time ago. See, I've stumbled into an experiential marketing job and had no idea that was even what it was called. I'm not a marketer by training (I'm an IT nerd for crying out loud). However, I've been directly involved in marketing products through online presence including tweets, videos, blog posts and webinars. I do in-person training, promotion and events. Basically, marketing. That's what this book is about. The book breaks down the concepts into simple chunks that are easily digested (very handy for someone who isn't steeped in marketing). Each of the simple concepts includes an example. How did Google benefit from this concept? What did Old Navy do to put this approach to work? You get the idea. While I'm not working for anyone as big as Google or Old Navy, I can still use a lot of the same approaches and methods to help my company out. Understanding what these methods are, and how they've been applied, absolutely helps to teach the approach. This book does it well. The most important part of the book for me though is the emphasis on measurement. It's one thing to tell you that you need to do X or Z to improve your marketing. Great. How do I know my marketing improved? Which improved it more, X or Z? More importantly, is the marketing leading to sales? Let's face it, talking to 10,000 people is great, but if only 1 purchased your product, not so great. Sales is really the measurement that means the most, and the book spends a pretty good amount of time on this. If anything, I think it could have spent more time on focusing on measurement. It's something I struggle sometimes to quantify to myself and my supervisors. Sometimes the book isn't as useful as a tool. Every so often reading it feels more like being preached at or... marketed to. Some of the ideas seem to be more of a sales pitch for the concept of experiential marketing. These are rare through the book, but you may spot them. Overall, this is a useful tool that I suspect is going to be well thumbed as I attempt to improve my game.

Today's audiences have been inundated with ads and "cutting through the clutter" has become a cliche. People aren't watching network television as much as they did. And we've seen so much video that even the best-produced ads can produce yawns. So what's a big brand to do? Get the audience involved beyond watching an ad. The idea is to connect with movement, "surprise and delight," or incentives. This book shares dozens of examples, with brief explanations and prescriptions. For instance, on p 95, the authors emphasize, "Marketers can't fake authenticity. The experience must emanate from the brand heritage or the brand story, and if your brand doesn't have one (or doesn't have a compelling one), then your first step is to find and/or build one. Inauthentic alignment, they warn, will inhibit engagement. Their examples include a live experience related to a game in Activision's Call of Duty series and AMEX's relationship with the US Open in 2014, "an on-site experience that allowed card members and prospects to digitally capture their experience in a highly relevant, shareable, and personalized way..." As an example of a targeted experiential marketing, the book refers to Red Bull's "syllabus hack" during the first week of school in Boston, a hub of colleges and universities.They offered campus events and a "socially driven scavenger hunt." Given that the product is a high-energy soft drink, I'd be concerned about the health consequences of promoting to college students. The book offers a glimpse into the possibilities out there, but it's not clear who's the intended audience. Small businesses might get inspiration from these examples but few will have the discretionary marketing funds to implement, and it appears that a fairly large, highly-involved audience will be required to enjoy the rewards. I found myself wondering who's got time to go on these weekend games or brand events and who's motivated to participate in a crowd-sourced Jack Daniels "build the bar" event; crowdsourcing for a highly profitable company seems a little odd, to say the least. Are these the loyal customers, who need little incentive to keep supporting the brand? The examples are described very briefly and although the titles refer to "anatomy" of the experience, we actually see the surface. I'm reminded of the various retail efforts on the Apprentice shows, where the contestants created pop-ups and product experiences. We see one after the other, very briefly. Big brands won't be reading a book to learn how to do experiential marketing. They have big staffs. Smaller companies could get ideas but it's not clear that these ideas work on a very small scale, beyond an open house in a neighborhood festival. For instance, in my neighborhood, a local clay studio set up wheel-throwing experiences as part of the neighborhood's "First Friday." I suspect they inadvertently used many principles in this book. The event apparently was successful in reaching prospective students for their adult classes. And perhaps that's the ultimate takeaway of the book. Look for ways to create experience, digitally or in person. And find an audience that's sufficiently involved and motivated to participate.

The maturing of “experiential marketing” combined with tectonic shifts in small business delivery in the time of the pandemic make this book well worth reading. A lot of what it contains is geared to larger companies, with relatively larger budgets. And that’s fine. It’s probably easier to persuade bigger, more visible companies to share tips and thoughts for a book like this than it would be to contact micro-size and relatively small companies. For the last 10 years or so, marketing buzzwords have included “authenticity,” “experiential” and “custom.” Can a small business with a tiny marketing budget hope to perform well on those and similar metrics? Absolutely. In some cases, especially where the company ethos is one of energy and partnership, owners and employees instinctively have banded together to do some of these things instinctually. And with reflection and targeted planning and execution, I’d make an argument that they can hit these and other goals out of the park. For those folks, books like this one work as “thought prompts” and sometimes parts lend themselves to be “recipe inspirations.” (Just like tailoring a professional chef’s recipe to serve 200 down to a family count of 4 or 6, it’s not merely math, but understanding of components. Or as my chef friends say, “watch the salt.”) I got value from reading this book twice. The first time, I skimmed it and flagged sections to revisit with post-it-type notes. The second time, I did a deeper read of tagged sections, and jotted notes in the margins of adaptations to consider and notes on why things worked, so that I could extrapolate.