Live brand experience
Live brand experiences, that is, brand relevant, two-way communications between consumers and brands, can be delivered face-to-face or remotely. These live experiences, designed to bring brand personalities to life while adding value to the consumer, are at the core of the experiential marketing approach at Blazinstar Experiential. The philosophy is simple. The other, non-live (both traditional and innovative) marketing communications channels are then inspired by the live brand experience, and integrated around it to amplify the impact of the big idea. Blazinstar Experiential focuses on experiential marketing as a key approach for achieving marketing objectives. The experiential approach is focused on a two-way interaction in real-time, a live brand experience and thereby a significantly deeper consumer bonding process. Live brand experiences usually manifest in the form of live events which require event management that allow the consumer to live, breathe and feel the brand through interactive sensory connections and activities. The activities are usually designed to add value to target audiences in their own environments, during their natural existence. However, live brand experiences are simply live, two-way branded experiences, and can be equally successful across many interactive technologies and platforms that facilitate communication between consumers and brands in real time. For example, consumers can participate in live brand experiences on TV where the shows’ content is fluid, and they participate in it and contribute to it in real time. Likewise, a live brand experience can be activated online in a virtual world such as second life. It is the recommendation of the team at Blazinstar Experiential for marketers to place live brand experiences at the core of their marketing communications strategies.
Experiential Marketing
Blazinstar Experiential’s creative team understands the benefits that experiential marketing can bring, such as bringing to life a brand personality, conveying complex messages, creating interactive memorable brand moments, driving word-of-mouth, creating brand advocacy and brand evangelists, increasing sales, driving traffic to websites, shifting people's perception of a brand, positioning or repositioning a brand, creating customer loyalty and more. To sum up on the difference between live brand experiences and field marketing: as long as the campaign has two-way interaction between the brand and the consumers through brand relevant experience that adds value, it is a live brand experience.
Blazinstar Experiential has shown how the results of these live brand experiences: two-way interactions with consumers are fantastic and genuine ways of building consumer relationships. They are central to the concept of designing experiential marketing plans that integrate live brand experience at their core, creating long-lasting brand advocacy that drives positive word-of-mouth amongst the target audience.
We have examined data that proves marketers are spending more on experiential marketing than ever before, and that the effectiveness of the live brand experience channel, when measured against any of the other mediums, is rating sky-high. We have seen how experiential marketing can be used creatively across all sectors, from financial to retail, from cosmetics to entertainment. With a creative ideas process that involves bringing to life a brand personality, experiential marketing is not just for FMCG brands, as some have previously supposed.
Experiential marketing agency or brand experience agency
Even though it is advisable to appoint an experiential marketing agency or brand experience agency that is expert at successfully handling the variable environments of live brand experiences, there are nonetheless several options to consider. While at brief stage, you may want to evaluate what you want to do in house and what is more effectively done externally. It is usually best to employ people in house for the customer experience management program and to employ an experiential marketing agency or brand experience agency for the live brand experiences. The other agencies can then work in partnership to amplify the live brand experience, forming the integrated experiential marketing campaign.
Companies go to many different types of agencies with live brand experience briefs. Frequent choices include PR agencies, advertising agencies, media agencies, direct marketing agencies, field marketing agencies, sales promotion agencies, and obviously experiential marketing agencies. They sometimes even go to the creative shops or event planning agencies. In other words, companies have been known to invite pretty much any of their agencies to pitch for the live brand experiences they want to implement. Therefore, it should be of no surprise that the experiential marketing medium as a whole has been subject to criticism, when at least half of the time, live brand experience campaigns are regularly implemented by non-specialist agencies, rather than experiential marketing agency or brand experience agency experts. With that said, a lot of the time the live brand experience part of the experiential marketing campaign will eventually be outsourced to an experiential marketing agency or brand experience agency specialist anyway, at least for activation.