
In the midst of a rapidly progressing change across the marketing industry, experiential marketing is acclimating and thriving as it becomes the vanguard of the world’s fastest-growing form of marketing. This once neglected and underestimated phenomenon is a powerful tool used by marketers to bring brands and products to life. The experiential, or event, marketing revolution is being led by fortune 1000 companies as they put more emphasis and budget into interactive consumer experiences. The powerfully persuasive effects of nostalgia on consumers from old school human interaction coupled with technically innovative social media share worthy moments, are transforming the marketing platform. The opportunities for experiential marketing are boundless, as is anything that is a product of bringing people and communities together. On top of that, experiential marketing is proving to be bulletproof in delivering immense return on investment. Everybody wins with experiential marketing. 

Marketing is the process through which goods and services go from concepts to the consumer. This process is the coordination of four things: the common textbook alliteration product, price, place, and promotions. While marketing is familiar concept to all, there are many aspects of it that consumers are oblivious to. Marketers prey on the vulnerability of humans to manipulate feelings and make you aware of their product and brand. Have you ever memorized a commercial jingle like it was a new top hit? When you walk past a bakery and smell fresh chocolate chip cookies, does it make you crave one? Ever wonder why you still don’t know that Kleenex is just a brand name and not the name for the actual piece of paper you blow your nose with? All of these responses are common behaviors that marketers use to control your spending. 

One of the most effective forms, is experiential marketing, also known as, event marketing. This concept differs from traditional marketing in many ways. In marketing there are two general forms of marketing above-the-line and below-the-line marketing. Above-the-line describes mass media ads; such as billboards and commercials. Whereas, below-the-line involves a more personal approach such as events and public relations. Experience marketing is becoming such a revolution because it incorporates the best of both, creating its own category. 

Event Marketing is defined as a themed event, display, or presentation leveraging in-person engagement to promote a product, service, cause, or organization. Events can happen online or offline, and can be hosted, sponsored, or participated in. In recent, experiential marketing has become its own industry. Due to the fact that it is proving to be one of the most impactful forms of marketing. When done right, events have the power to create lasting and deep impressions of a brand, product or service on a consumer. Event marketing comes in various forms, including event sponsorship, trade shows, pop-up brand stores, product launches, press conferences, customer contests, competitions, street shows, and many others. One of the underlying characteristics of event marketing is high audience involvement. The logic behind this concept is that through things like pop-up shops, trade shows, and sponsored events marketers can insert their brand experience into the consumer's’ daily routine. Allowing people to experience and interact with a brand or product maximizes the potential for an increase in brand equity. Event marketing initiates a growth in consumer loyalty by increasing brand awareness and providing product knowledge. All of these facets lead to a consumer’s likeliness to purchase a product or service. 

One of the biggest difference between traditional marketing approaches and experiential marketing, is its consumer approval rating. Done well, event marketing environments involve consumers making the effort to approach marketers. Nobody enjoys commercials or pushy salesman, but people will pay money to attend a sporting event, tradeshow, conference, even a music festival. The reason for this is novelty. Novelty is considered the essence of event marketing. “Bringing the audience into a lively engagement with a unique set of concepts, ideas, and activities constitutes the heart of event marketing (Drenger et al. 2008). In event marketing the attendees are being entertained and choosing to be there. Their moods are happy and are guaranteed to be more receptive to advertising efforts. 

Multisensory stimulation, social interaction, and epistemic experience are the three focal points of experience marketing that make it so effective (Tafesse). Events are an opportunity for consumers to touch, taste, hear, smell and see a brand. An event is a memorable social experience that a consumer can resonate and have emotions with. It is the optimal way to build a relationship with a consumer for all of those reasons and more. 

Experience can be a complex idea to grasp. There is a noun and a verb form. The American Heritage Dictionary defines experience the noun as “the apprehension of an object or emotion through the senses,” and as a verb “to experience is to participate in personally; undergo” (Joy & Sherry, 2003 p.259). Experience marketing involves both renditions. The Consumer culture theory studies experience as a verb. They build on this understanding of experience “as a perceptual phenomenon to develop the symbolic, performative, and social dimensions of consumption experience” In other words, experiences focus on fun, feelings, fantasies, daydreams induced by products and their associated meanings unique to each participant (Tafesse). Researchers have made strides in defining experience marketing and have come up with many ways you can measure effectiveness. The formal definition for brand experience is “a subjective, internal consumer response (sensations, feelings, and cognitions) and behavioral responses evoked by brand-related stimuli that are part of a brand’s design and identity, packaging, communication, and environments” (Barkus et al. 2009, p.53). Experience is the way in which people harmoniously engage sight, sound, feeling, taste, and smell of a brand. This multisensory stimulation is the jackpot that makes experience marketing so effective. 

Effectiveness of experience marketing can be measured by the degree to which a brand appeals to a consumer's sensory qualities. How well a marketer does in this department is directly correlated with event success. People react to senses, those responses cause emotion, they then lead to a physical action and then an intellectual one. Think about watching a movie. Where there is an intense scene, the music in the background tells you whether to feel happy, sad, scared or thrilled! That emotion then causes a physical act like crying, laughing, smiling, or wide eyes. Later when reflecting on that experience all of those emotions come back to you. Event marketers aim to make you feel a certain way so you associate that feeling with that brand when you later think about it. Done well, a marketer can create a special memory in your brain that is directly associated with a brand. 

In addition, social experience and brand or product knowledge play a large role in what makes experiential marketing so effective. Think of a trade show for example, a car shows to be exact. Car shows are an opportunity for car brands of a certain caliber to stand out. Each exhibit represents a brand from head to toe. The multisensory stimulation from getting a 360 view of the car, opening and closing the doors, smelling that distinguished new car leather scent and testing the stereo is just the tip of the iceberg that entices customers. Additionally, these exhibits often provide creative technologically sound display, like an iPad or large touch screen on a wall, that you can touch and find out more about the car. This enhances a consumer's product knowledge making them much more likely to purchase a car because they know about where it comes from and the brand’s image is well developed. The last bit to the formula, is the human interaction. Verbal communication with brand ambassadors supply consumers with vital information about the car. More importantly, the interaction and connection the ambassador makes with the consumer is an extension of the brand’s image. If the potential consumer likes you, there is a high chance the consumer will like the brand you represent. This is why hostesses, front desk managers, and in this case stand representatives are always attractive and smiling. The image of the person representing the brand must match the quality of the brand. 

When sensory stimulation is coupled with social interaction and an epistemic experience, all units work together in creating a perfect combination of above-the-line and below-the-line marketing. The unique sequence makes experiential marketing undoubtedly effective. 

There are many factors that have led to the recent popularity of this industry, but one of the largest contributors is the influence of social media in marketing. The blurred line between reality and virtual reality has led to a blurring in above-the-line and below-the-line marketing efforts. Trendy and unique experiences, normally more popular with hard to reach target markets, have become more favorable to consumers, and in turn, more effective to marketers. 

Blame it on the hipster revolution, because as a society we have become more nostalgic and appreciative of interpersonal communication and like to show it off via our social media accounts. Creating experiences consumers can associate happy memories while utilizing their six senses to evaluate and resonate with a product or brand that they can later post about the experience has proven time and time again to be one of the most effective forms of marketing. It’s not just about touching something, but touching something digitally. 

Through the extensive reach of social media and advancements in technology, event marketing can create a powerful engagement platform by combining the best of above-the-line and below-the-line marketing by creating “shareable” experiences that consumers will want to share with all one-thousand or more “friends” they’re connected to on social media. Steve Stoute, founder and CEO of marketing agency Translation, “effective experience marketing needs to involve the consumer before, during, and after an event”. This has encouraged major creative influence for promotional events making it one of the most up and coming industries. 

MKG, an experiential marketing agency, did a specific Delta Airlines promotion that combines social media and personal connection. Delta was working with LinkedIn and TED to find the top innovators of the world on their way to events around the world. They would receive a seat on the plane called a “mentor seat” and the seat next to them would be empty. MKG built a ceiling full of screens in a mirrored room for a TED conference comprised of more innovators. This is how it worked, a TED attendee would step into the artsy looking room and plug in their twitter and Instagram account. The individual's social media likes and followers and reposts would fly up onto the screen and shift displaying lots of color and movement that was reflected in the mirror. The information would filter through an algorithm that matched their social media content with one of the mentors previously selected. Some were lucky enough to receive a seat on the plane that encouraged major networking, but all received an automated message from delta connecting the two individuals that had things in common. The room also acted as a photo booth and snapped a great artsy pic of you in the room that you could then share on your account where an automated post by delta describing their initiative and new brand image to the world. This stunt generated over 16 million twitter impressions and more than 1.2 million LinkedIn impressions. To say that social media is changing the game is an understatement. Social media can combine innovation and creativity with human interaction while making it as easy as clicking a button to promote a product.  

Not all social media efforts are so complex. Social media can be an easy way for a marketer to find out what its target market wants from them, and can quickly show a marketer who that target audience is. Kevin Meany, founder and CEO of promotions specialist BFG Communications, noted that a recent promotion with Coca-Cola and Buffalo Wild Wings generated 118 million social impressions. It included a location-based mobile game that 45% of the players who checked into the game shared content on social networks. 

A major leader in experience marketing, 306i, says that “It isn’t inspiration to click a button...It is inspiration that drives people to share a piece of your brand that they’ve connected with – emotionally or otherwise. It is this connection and this kind of thinking that could make experiential marketing the future of social media as we know it”. With the blurred lines between online and offline experiential marketing has entered a much larger and more excited place. 

The effectiveness of experiential marketing can be measured in many ways, but the world’s largest analysts of the field is the Event Marketing Institute. They conduct an annual study that monitors the continual growth and groundbreaking expansion of the experiential marketing industry. The annual study is called Event Track and uses two research studies, one to brands within the fortune 1000 and the other to thousands of consumers. The results combine ‘what experiential marketers are doing, and why’ along with ‘how consumers react to the efforts and buy’. According to Event Track’s 2015 reports, “companies and brands are increasing their event and experiential marketing budgets by a healthy 6.1% in 2015”. Comparatively, this is up from the previous 5.4% increase in 2014. Recent studies suggest that the “average growth rate [was] nearly three times the level of [2015] U.S. GDP growth”. Companies across the world are adapting this newly popular form of marketing. It has been increasingly more common every year and the money does not lie. Events and experiences provide compelling return on investment. In the 2015 Event Track survey, 48% of companies discovered a ROI (return on investment) between three to one, and five to one. 29% indicated their return was over ten to one, and the last 12% said their return on investment was over twenty to one. The criteria used to measure these returns are as follows: total attendance, social media likes and posts, post-event sales, on-site sales, website traffic, press coverage, amount of time consumer spent at experience, and gross sales related to event. 

Experiential marketing has the ability to connect a consumer to a brand, a brand to a community, and a consumer with a memory. More often than not, these events take place where local services are needed. They are good for local business, tourism as well as community improvement. Community outreach, or philanthropy, improves corporate image and brand reputation. It establishes your relevance within a community. The results of corporate and nonprofit relationships are undeniable. According to Harvard Law research, “community outreach and corporate social responsibility programs create distinct value that leads to increased customer loyalty, willingness to pay premium prices, and lower reputational risks in crisis situations”.  Cone Communications also found that “59 percent of Americans are more likely to buy a product associated with a non-profit-corporate partnership”. Everybody wins in event marketing, and it’s proven with records of significant return on investment in all aspects. 

The opportunities for experiential marketing are endless. Events bring people and communities together creating an unforgettable energy that marketers can cash in on while making a difference. Experience marketing is the answer to blurring the lines between reality and virtual reality for generations craving what they thought was lost, human interaction. This unique form of marketing is the future. As it adapts to feed the needs of today and tomorrow’s consumers, this concept, while strong in its ethics to improve society, also provides a bulletproof formula for immense return on investment for companies. Everyone wins with experiential marketing. 
