From Engagement to Inspiration: Unleashing the Potential of Experiential Marketing with Real-Life Examples

There are a lot of businesses making noise in the online space. So as a small business, it can be hard to stand out, create hype, and build a meaningful relationship with your target audience. That’s where experiential marketing campaigns come in. This kind of marketing enables businesses to establish an emotional connection with potential customers.

While experiential marketing has the potential to get big results, it’s more of an investment than social media marketing, for example. Here’s what you need to know about using experiential campaigns successfully for business growth.

What is experiential marketing?

Experiential marketing is also known as engagement marketing and involves a business creating an engaging and memorable experience for its target audience. This could take the form of an in-person live event or a virtual brand experience. The point is that it’s an immersive and interactive experience that stands out in the minds of potential customers.

The fact that it’s a unique experience is what separates it from traditional event marketing. Experiential campaigns aren’t just conferences or webinars. They offer something new and different that reflects the brand’s values. Experiential marketing strategies often utilise new technology, such as virtual reality to enable direct engagement even in the online world.

The Importance of Experiential Marketing

Businesses exist in a highly competitive environment. That means they need to do more to impress customers and generate loyalty. Experiential marketing events are an opportunity to do that. They catch people’s attention and spread brand awareness, both through promotional content and word-of-mouth.

As they are hands-on and unique, they are more memorable for attendees and attendees are more likely to share their experience, again through social media or conversations. Especially if you encourage sharing through an incentive like a dedicated campaign hashtag. Essentially, it’s an opportunity to turn leads into brand ambassadors.

By creating an on-brand marketing experience, you can make a long-lasting impact on your brand perception and loyalty among new and old customers. It’s particularly well-suited for the launch of new products. It serves as a brand activation activity that gets your target audience familiar with, interested in, and buying a brand-new product by bringing it into the real world.

10 Innovative and Immersive Experiential Marketing Examples

So what can experiential marketing look like? Here are a few real-life examples of how businesses have used experiential campaigns to better connect with customers.

1. Adidas: Jump with Derrick Rose

Adidas did a pop-up store differently. The campaign was called the D Rose Jump store, named after American basketball star Derrick Rose, whose signature shoes were Adidas, and it worked like this. All the shoes in the pop-up store were free. But they were up 10 feet high, so you had to jump as high as pro athlete Derrick Rose, who was in-store to help.

The location was poignant to this campaign because it was the basis of the storytelling. Derrick Rose is an incredibly successful sports star who came from humble beginnings. The store was set up in a Hackney community centre, and kids were invited to meet the sports star and win free basketball shoes. As well as creating hype around the product, it inspired customers to chase their dreams.

2. Kit-Kat’s: Free No WiFi Zone

Kit-Kat’s slogan ‘Have a break, have a Kit-Kat’ is incredibly successful. The brand built on the success of this traditional marketing campaign to create a powerful experiential campaign. In Amsterdam, they set up ‘no free wifi zones’, subverting the popularity of free wifi zones. The benches beneath the signs (where any internet connectivity was blocked) were there so people could take a break from the digital world and enjoy the real world. It was on-brand, simple, and challenged expectations at the same time.

3. M&M: Flavour Rooms

Consumers get passionate about their favourite foods, never mind the best flavours of popular branded products. M&M bet on that by getting their customers involved in the process of picking new M&M flavours. They organised an immersive pop-up in New York City where people could explore different flavor rooms. Each room was themed around the flavour in question, and participants could pick up M&M-themed snacks and cocktails.

The experience was visually impressive, catching the eye of passers-by and giving participants a reason to share the experience on social media which ups the impact. It also shows that the brand cares about the opinion of its customers, strengthening the business-customer relationship.

4. Warner Bros Pictures: Barbie Movie Selfie Generator

The Barbie marketing team knew exactly who they were targeting in their campaigns – millennials who played with Barbie growing up and now spend their downtime on social media. So they combined both worlds with the Barbie Movie Selfie Generator. It was a tool for fans to turn their selfies into their own Barbie movie poster. It was interactive and immersive, allowing customers to enter Barbieworld themselves.

Many participants shared the movie posters they created on social media, becoming advocates of the movie before they had even seen it. Despite being an online campaign, it was interactive and exciting enough to build up hype and anticipation before release day.

5. WestJet: Christmas Miracle

The video of WestJet’s Christmas Miracle campaign went viral because it was so emotional and magical. The stunt began with passengers about to board WestJet flights being asked by an on-screen Santa what they would like for Christmas. The staff were taking notes of what the passengers wished for so they could buy and wrap the gifts which were then delivered to the passengers on landing.

Santa made an appearance, and many passengers were seen hugging him in thanks in the viral video, which hit 12 million views in just 3 days. The campaign worked so well because it showed care for customers during a time of giving and during a period when a lot of their customers use their services to see friends and family.

6. Netflix and Baskin-Robbins: Scoops Ahoy

Have you ever wanted to step into the world of your favourite TV show? Netflix and Baskin-Robbins joined forces to make that happen. Together they brought to life the fictional ice cream parlor in the popular Netflix show Stranger Things. It was a replica that made fans feel like they had not only stepped onto the Stranger Things set but back in time to the 80s when the show was set.

To bring the experience to a greater audience beyond the two ice cream parlour locations, Baskin-Robbins created a Stranger Things-inspired ice cream flavour called ‘USS Butterscotch’ which for a limited time was sold nationwide at Baskin-Robbins stores. It drew Netflix fans to buy Baskin-Robbins products and created a deeper emotional connection with the well-loved show.

7. Coca-Cola: 2018 World Cup AR

Event sponsorship is a great way to increase brand awareness and engagement. Coca-Cola leveraged its sponsorship of the 2018 World Cup through an augmented reality campaign. A large screen was set up in Zurich train station that allowed participants to show their football skills and even compete alongside famous footballers including Switzerland’s Xherdan Shaqiri. This worked well because it created a fun memory associating Coca-Cola with the experience of a popular sports event.

8. Disney: The Mad Hatter Surprise

Disney knows a thing or two about creating a magical experience. To promote the release of the movie ‘Alice Through The Looking Glass’, they surprised their most loyal supporters – Disney Park attendees. One of the stars of the movie, Johnny Depp, was live-streamed onto what guests thought was a static billboard at the California resort. When the Mad Hatter started moving, speaking, and responding, participants were thrilled.

The marketing team then turned the reactions of park guests into a video that has been watched millions of times. What felt like a special experience for guests at the park on that day was turned into a digital marketing campaign that effectively reached a large audience. Disney got the best of both worlds with an interactive and intimate experience that was also enjoyed on a wide scale.

9. IKEA: In-Store Sleepover

You may not have to come up with creative experiential marketing ideas yourself. Your campaign could be customer-led which is even better because it will already have customer buy-in. That’s what IKEA did in 2011.

A customer had set up a Facebook group called ‘I wanna have a sleepover in Ikea’. After almost 100,000 people joined the group, they decided to make it a reality for 100 customers. They added a way to encourage action-taking by ensuring mattress experts were on hand in case participants wanted to buy the mattress they spent the night on.

10. Lean Cuisine: #WeighThis

Lean Cuisine used an experiential marketing campaign to connect with its audience on a deeper level and demonstrate a real understanding of their experiences by addressing the pressure to lose weight. It started by asking real women about their biggest accomplishments that they’d prefer to be judged by instead of their physical weight.

Then they turned their responses into an installation by painting them onto signs. They took the conversation online by creating their own hashtag #WeighThis and asking women to post on social media about how they’d like to be weighed. It was emotional. It was meaningful. It felt more like a movement than a marketing campaign.