Author: Sense Admin

The recent news of the IPM’s efforts to develop a standardised measure to evaluate brand experience has been greeted enthusiastically by the industry. It’s not hard to see why.

Nail this and we will have finally ‘grown up’, taking our place at the client’s top table alongside other more established disciplines that traditionally have called the shots. Experiential marketing budgets will swell as age-old misgivings are swept aside, and none of us shall ever again be subject to the awkward grillings that our colleagues in other areas of marketing seem to avoid.

So yeah, it will be pretty great. Or at least it would be if it were possible.

While there is no doubt that this project will provide many valuable learnings that will sharpen our measurement abilities, one thing it categorically won’t do is provide a single standard formula like those enjoyed by other channels. The reason for this is simple: brand experience isn’t a channel at all.

The definition of a channel is a consistent format that can carry a marketing message. TV, for instance, is an obvious channel, since all ads are carried in fundamentally the same way (30 seconds of video in between programmes), no matter what their creative idea. It is this formal consistency that allows for consistent measurement – there are no variations from one campaign to another that would require a change in methodology.

Brand experience on the other hand, has almost no formal consistency. As IPM Experiential Council Chair Jessica Hargreaves said in her recent piece in Event: “From sampling to intimate events and stunts, to huge festival experiences, the world of experiential is very broad.” Indeed, how much similarity is there between, say, a washing machine demo at the Ideal Home Show and a projection mapping stunt on the Houses of Parliament? What is the channel here? And what if the demo includes a Facebook mechanic, and the stunt gets a million views on YouTube? Are the channels here Facebook and YouTube? Or are they experiential? Or both? Which pieces of the campaigns are you measuring?

The point here isn’t that these campaigns can’t be measured. It’s just that they require different methodologies – especially if they actually work, as so much experiential does now, by blending different channels. We find that in many cases researching one campaign might actually come down to researching three or four different things, and then blending them to get the full picture. Or even if we research two campaigns that superficially might appear similar (say, two tactical sampling campaigns) we might have to change the methodology totally due to one small difference between them. This is not channel behaviour.

We might wonder, therefore, if experiential isn’t a channel, then what is it? I would suggest that experiential is in fact a technique of marketing, a technique that can be applied to channels, but which isn’t a channel itself. The clue is all in the grammar – experiential isn’t a noun (like TV), it’s an adjective. It describes the characteristics of something, not what it is. The characteristic, in this case, is broadly ‘something that’s activated in the real world’ – even if the end audience doesn’t experience it that way. This is why we call live stunts that go viral on YouTube ‘experiential’. Clearly most people don’t ‘experience’ them – they’re just sitting at their computer – but the fact that the original idea was activated ‘live’ gives the work that character.

For a similar example, imagine I was to talk about ‘scary marketing’. This too would be a technique – describing a piece of work without defining its structure. Clearly it would make little sense to attempt to create a unified measurement formula for scary marketing, and yet this is what we are trying to do with experiential.

If our aim is to prove the effectiveness of experiential, a good approach would be to explore how it can have a multiplying effect on other channels. Often our campaigns involve getting brands to prove their claims, which can lead to much more engaging content in this post-reality TV age. We also engage real people in our work, which has obvious implications on social channels. Ours is an eminently measurable discipline – we just have to zoom out a little bit.

I look forward to the insights of the project, and hope they will help us understand the effectiveness of our work at another level. But let’s not try and unify what we do. We’re bigger than that.

Alex Smith is Planning Director at Sense.

You might also be interested in reading our post about measuring experiential marketing campaign ROI, which goes deeper into the how of measuring brand experience.

Humans are not the only animals that talk. The handsome-sounding moustached bat is said to have 33 different “syllables” at its disposal with which to communicate with its pals. Bees, rather fabulously, communicate through the language of dance. We are however the only animals that record what we say. There is sadly no record of the chat between two moustached bats in 1992, but there are plenty of those between people.

The benefits of this innovation are pretty clear. It has allowed us to pile knowledge upon knowledge, with each new creation being, as Ian Malcolm would say, built by standing on the shoulders of giants that have gone before. It has also allowed us to communicate indirectly, through everything from a text message to a letter to this article you’re reading now. Unlike animals we don’t need to be in earshot of people we want to send messages to – the written word can do that for us.

However, like all human inventions, writing is flawed. Its lack of nuance has burned everyone who’s put pen to paper or finger to screen in their lives; we’ve all had something taken the wrong way. They say that most of our communication is non-verbal – or more specifically, “non-wordal” – so what does that mean when our main form of getting information across uses only words?

It means we innovate.

It started with onomatopoeia – things like “hahahah”, “arrrrggghhh”, or “yayyyyy” – graduated to emoticons and emojis, and has now reached its latest iteration, the animated gif.

Compare these different ways to say the same thing:

That’s funny

Hahaha!

https://media.giphy.com/media/13u62DeVLpS0UM/giphy.gif

Clearly the subtlety of the communication increases as we progress through the evolution. It’s strange, when you think about it, that in most people’s estimation that progression also represents increasing informality and (at least in a business sense) inappropriateness. Why would we be biased against more sophisticated and accurate communication?

It’s possible that what we’re seeing is, in essence, the creation of a new alphabet. In 100 years’ time we may well find emojis and gifs operating as common “words” even in official documents. Modest smiley faces are already creeping into our work emails, so things are well on the way. And why not? We’re just trying to communicate, and we should use the best tools we have at our disposal.

But where to after gifs? Is there another step on this journey? Certainly, although it’s more likely to be a “shrinking” of the gif concept, rather than an extension. This is because gifs are dangerously close to being a whole other form of communication altogether: video. The beauty of a gif is that it’s one-note and quick, meaning that it can be implanted into text without breaking the flow. Expand it anymore, and it no longer serves as a tonal communication which people can customise; it becomes its own discrete narrative. Thus the best next step from here might be mini-gifs, that are a bit less cumbersome. Or animated emojis. Or even animated words themselves. Anything that enriches meaning will have a chance of catching on.

For brands this deeper form of “written” communication presents some interesting opportunities. Of course we have already seen many toying with the use of emojis in their campaigns, and even one or two gifs. But it won’t stop there. Who’s to say that a brand’s tagline in the future might not be a word, but a look? A raised eyebrow or satisfied grin? How about this for Sprite’s next sign off?

http://imgur.com/zeH4BOl

The closer brands are able to mimic the benchmark of one-to-one in-person communication, the more strongly they will be able to build a connection.

Still, nothing can beat the real thing. If you want to have a meaningful conversation with someone you meet them in person. The meatier the subject, the more effort you take to move it away from the written word – gif enhanced or not. This is why the smartest brands build that human frontline. Apple didn’t make Apple Stores because of the retail opportunity. If that was truly compelling you would have found Dell right there with them. No, they did it because the appreciated the strength of direct interaction, rather than interaction mediated through writing – or even worse the writing of others like independent retailers.

Just as water finds its way downhill, everything we do trickles towards deeper connection. To those that understand this best comes the prize.

Alex Smith is Planning Director at real world marketing agency Sense

senselondon.com

Barely a week goes by without a press story surfacing about gender stereotyping and the toy industry.

For every seemingly positive story about Hamley’s and other retailers ditching the distinction of “girl toy” and “boy toy” aisles and Smyth’s lauded “If I Were A Toy” Christmas ad, another counter-outrage whips up about sexist categorisation in Subway kids’ meal bags (action figures for boys, pretty wristbands for girls) or the Early Learning Centre promoting regressive play sterotypes (boys as rescuing knights, girls the rescued princesses).

In an age of alternative facts and media sensationalism it is difficult to divine actual “outrage” from manufactured versions. For every lobbying group like “Let Toys Be Toys” there is plenty of anecdotal evidence from parents who simply don’t see the issue or feel it is one to get animated about.

As a result, it is not difficult to feel sympathy for toy companies who are dammed if they do and dammed if they don’t – particularly with historical intellectual properties. When Hasbro bought out the first wave of Stars Wars toys from “The Force Awakens” movie it was hit by a #WheresRey Twitter campaign (protesting the seeming absence of a leading female character from the movie in the toy line). Given levels of hype and movie secrecy issues, not to mention toy production lead times, it’s reasonable to assume licensee toymakers may not have full access to storylines or cannot predict with absolute certainty which characters will be popular and have a life in the toy market.

The issue of gender-neutral advertising then is a very tricky one for the toy industry. How can they make a progressive case for their properties at the same time as not alienating an existing fanbase? The Lego Friends line initially outraged both progressive parents and sneery died-in-the wool Lego geeks, but it is historical fact that almost from its inception Lego has worked hard to market to parents of girls (its 1981 “This is Beautiful” ad became a recent Facebook viral sensation). Mattel continues to promote the “pink” of the Barbie line, as well as accommodate dolls with different body shapes and ethnicity.

Ultimately, the products made by toymakers will succeed or fail on the tastes and attitudes of a very diverse marketplace. There is no one “boy” or “girl” consumer type, in the same way that no parent will ever feel the same on parenting issues.

So how can toy marketers navigate these waters when trying to create a broader consumer base for traditionally gendered toy lines? Play must be the way through toy brand experiences. As a father of both a boy and a girl I have observed how distinctions fall away in shared activity – with my daughter playing Ninjago Lego and my son reaching for My Little Pony. On a larger scale, big brand experiences can bring kids of both genders together if you can add creative nuance and be flexible around brand guidelines. Cool tech brings a generation of kids raised on iPads together; welcoming staff can make product demonstrations an entertainment – there are many tips and tricks you can employ to help break down traditional gender territories.

As a kid, I flung my action man through the mud, before washing his hair in my imaginary hair salon! There are no rules set on play; it unlocks the imagination. And by encouraging children to get hands on with toys in the real world through carefully planned and targeted experiential marketing campaigns, brands can break down gendered attitudes and present a more diverse image, while also testing the preferences of their young audience first hand.

Nick Swift is senior account director at real world marketing agency Sense, which has designed and run brand experiences for a range of toy and game brands, including most recently Transformers, My Little Pony, Guitar Hero and Bop It!.

www.senselondon.com

Recently, at one of the biggest experiential industry conferences of the year, you couldn’t turn a corner without being faced by VR in some form – a vendor sales pitch, an agency case study or live brand experience.  For me – and no doubt my fellow marketers – it was an education. The full A-Z on how to (and how not to) use the technology.  What a relief.

Until now we’ve felt like we should be on the VR train, but have been reluctant to leave the platform.

Our business is about bringing brands ‘to life,’ providing a vibrant and positive assault on the senses.  It feels counter-intuitive to invite consumers to (more often than not) sit down, cover their eyes and find themselves in a virtual world – which rarely lives up to the promise…or the real world that surrounds them.

In too many cases, it seems the desire for an ‘innovative campaign’ has led to briefs with VR rather than the consumer at the center, and so inevitably, the final experience falls short.  Fundamentally, the inclusion of this technology isn’t a guarantee of success.  Success comes from using the tool to radically enhance or provide layers to the story already being told.  VR isn’t THE story.

A brilliant example is the award-winning American Express campaign (pictured above), that gave attendees of the 2015 American Open the chance to face Maria Sharapova, and tackle her famous 100mph serve. This physical ‘money can’t buy’ moment was experienced by thousands over the course of the event, but in real reality it is a dream very few would be able to achieve.  Amex wanted to show potential customers that they would always go the extra mile for them – don’t just watch your favorite athletes, play against them!

Another came from Ford, who used Mixed Reality to virtually peel back the layers of body work on cars at Auto Shows, to reveal their inner features.  A ‘surprise and delight’ moment, that wowed audiences during live demonstrations, and provided access to parts of the vehicles not normally visible.

In both examples, the latest technologies were utilized using experts from all over the world, suggesting that budgets were plentiful. However, despite the proportion of investment in technology, it didn’t dominate – it simply helped the brands tell a better story and put customer curiosity and ambition at the heart of their experiences.

Looking ahead, the ability to even more closely measure consumer reactions to our activities through VR is incredibly exciting, and another step forward for experiential.  To understand exactly how a user is going through an experience, down to the level of eye tracking, pauses, hand gestures and heat mapping, will enable us to adapt and evolve concepts in minute detail – to achieve maximum consumer satisfaction.  This really does feel like the holy grail.

Finally, we’re on board.

Sarah Priestman is President of Sense New York.

One thousand chief marketing officers and brand managers in Europe, North America, and Asia were polled by brand experience agency Freeman data solutions and research provider SSI about where they expect to direct their resources.

Globally, 51% said they would spend more than a fifth of their budget on experiential in the next three to five years, compared to just 31% who do so currently.

The bulk of these – 37% of those polled – said they expected to spend between 21% and 50% of their budgets on experiential.

Meanwhile, 14% said they would spend more than half of their budget on brand experience – but this compares to 18% who do so already, suggesting marketers increasingly see experiential as a major part of a mixed strategy, rather than a single dominant channel.

Chris Cavanaugh, executive vice-president, and chief marketing officer at Freeman, said the numbers showed that brand experience was continuing to grow in scope and importance.

He added: “Steep competition, changing demographics, and more sophisticated audiences mean now, more than ever, marketers need new approaches. The right brand experiences have the power to evolve brands, build relationships and inspire action.”

Commenting on the research, Sense Deputy MD Lou Garrod said: “We wholly support the research by Freeman. We’re in the height of the experience economy with more and more brands using experiences to connect with consumers. We’re likely to see brands in non-traditional sectors using the medium of experience to engage. For example, from financial institutions and legal firms to Publishers (The Economist) and utilities providers.

Click here to read the full article in Campaign.

A truism that pervades our industry is that the worst thing that can happen to your work is not to have it hated, but to have it ignored.

Well, I hope this thought is keeping the Pepsi team warm tonight, because it’s probably the only morsel of comfort to be found in the wreckage of their latest ad and flames of mockery that have engulfed it.

To be fair I guess they can also take heart in the fact that they did indeed manage to unite people – just like they said they would – it’s just a shame that the common ground they provided was at their expense.

There probably hasn’t ever been an ad storm quite like this, but the closest parallel that comes to mind is the infamous Protein World scandal from 2015.  And this should make us pause for thought.  For Protein World’s campaign was not only hated; it was incredibly successful, garnering £2 million of sales for the small brand in a few short days.  Could the same reward befall Pepsi?

The short answer is… probably not.

The two scenarios aren’t really analogous, since Protein World chose a particular side of an argument, and simply defended it to the hilt, thereby attracting hate from one faction but fandom from another.  Pepsi on the other hand also chose a particular side in the culture wars, but it is this side that has turned against it the most viciously, with the protesting classes voicing deep offence at the work while the other side of the aisle simply shake their head incredulously.  In other words, at least some people were on Protein World’s side – Pepsi on the other hand has no one.

That said, if hatred is better than indifference, then there should still be glimmers of hope to be found for the brand.  So here are three reasons to be (sort of) cheerful…

The Ironic Purchaser

About a decade ago a game swept across American college campuses called “Icing”.  What it essentially involved was hiding a Smirnoff Ice in a creative manner so that someone would stumble across it (like baked in a cake say).  When they did, they were officially “Iced”, and as such were obliged to drop down on one knee and down it – unless they happened to be armed with an “Ice” themselves with which to block the attack.

Needless to say, the root of this game was not a deep admiration for the brand.  In fact it was the very perceived “naffness” of Smirnoff Ice that gave the game its humour.  Not great for the brand you might think, until you realise that an ironic purchase looks the same on the bottom line as a sincere one, and the people buying the product for this reason are in fact incremental buyers who otherwise wouldn’t be buying it at all.

When it comes to Pepsi, the fact is that the vast majority of people will be unaffected by this ad.  They might have a laugh at the brand’s expense, or more likely let the scandal pass them by completely; either way their base layer of sales won’t go anywhere.  

Pepsi has now unwittingly launched an all new purpose for itself – a sort of ironic “injustice shield”.  All around the United States people will be handing cans to cops, creating memes, and generally battling prejudice with the cans for quite some time.  Who knows, it may follow them for years, just like Icing did Smirnoff.  And these sales, they’ll be a bonus.

Mockery Is Not The Same As Hate

Generally when a brand gets embroiled in something like this, there is venom in the criticism they face.  That’s certainly what Protein World experienced, as have most other brands who waded into murky political waters.  With Pepsi the tone has been rather different.  Maybe it’s the earnestness of the spot, or the fact that they were clearly trying so hard to be “good”, but there’s something in the commentary that is more patronising than furious.

The most common term I’ve heard applied to it is “tone-deaf”.  That is not the same thing as malicious, and as such one would imagine that the mud is unlikely to stick to the brand for long.  There have been no calls to boycott, and indeed there has been something bordering on affection and pity in much of the commentary.  Could Pepsi actually emerge from this with slightly improved unconscious brand sentiment thanks to their utter haplessness?  Stranger things have happened.

Finally, Let’s Face It, It’s Massive

If we accept some of the above premises, namely that most people will have the details of this case rather pass them by, and even if they don’t they will feel more pity or amusement than anger towards the brand, then we can only conclude the following: this is kind of a hit.

Rarely has any ad generated so much buzz, or received such numerical success as this.  Pepsi, now, are simply more famous than they were a week ago.  A brand that hasn’t made ripples for a long time has just cannonballed into the pool of public consciousness, and the principal residue that will be left behind will probably be simply fame.

For a product that’s bought on impulse, with little deliberation by a fairly disinterested buyer, that’s not such a bad result.

Alex Smith is Planning Director at real world marketing agency Sense.

The article appears on Cream Global.

Rather than discovering a host of creative ideas and exciting experiences at the UK’s leading lifestyle event, Rose McDonnell, Group Account Director at Sense, was disappointed to find that it was more like walking through the cosmetics section of a department store.

If your brand had the opportunity to engage with almost a quarter of a million people face to face, wouldn’t you jump at the chance?

This is what the Ideal Home Show offers its exhibitors over 17 days – including the first week of the Easter holidays. It provides a wonderful opportunity for related brands to take themselves beyond the printed page, computer screen, and mobile device to touch people in a deeper, more authentic way in the real world. And with recent research revealing that 38% of people are more cynical about brands than five years ago, this has never been more important.

Sadly the majority of exhibitors at this year’s show completely missed this opportunity to give visitors – and paying ones at that, let’s not forget – a truly engaging and immersive brand experience. That’s a captive audience eager to learn about new products and services; looking for inspiration about how to improve their home and lifestyle; keen to sample new and exciting experiences – surely a marketer’s dream.

Unless your product or service is absolutely unique, new, and innovative, you have to do more to stand out, be original, be memorable. Especially, if you are sited next to or in the vicinity of your key competitors, which many brands at this year’s event were. Unfortunately, each stand looked pretty much the same. It was basically like walking through the perfume section of a department store – only worse because you had paid to get in.

Panasonic and Vitamix, for example, were neighbouring exhibitors promoting similar products: food processors. Yet their stands were almost identical, both offering similar solutions: the same functional benefit from a blender. Where was the emotional benefit and the true experience? What would visitors gain from buying Panasonic’s over Vitamix’s? Who knows? Those brands certainly weren’t giving out any hints.

You’d think that at least disruptive startups Gousto, Hello Fresh, and Able and Cole, which are currently shaking up the grocery sector, would recognise the huge opportunities to sign up thousands of new members and really put on a show to differentiate themselves from each other. Well, you’d be disappointed. Each had a salesperson and a simple branded stand. And the even more bizarre thing is that taking a stand at The Ideal Home Show is far from cheap, so you’d think that every brand would be doing its utmost to maximise the return on this not-insignificant investment.

It’s not a case of having to throw money at it, but rather simply communicating what your brand is about in a creative and engaging way. People buy people and rarely do brands get the chance to be this close to the people who really matter, show off their personality and get across that they’re all about. For many brands at this year’s Ideal Home Show it seemed to be more about: “We’d better have some kind of a presence” – a token gesture. Perhaps they prefer to focus on other forms of marketing like digital.

Sadly, it seems that many brands failed to understand that by creating a truly effective live brand experience – especially over nearly three weeks – provides the ideal way to bring together all their campaigns and amplify them through digital and social media. Real world marketing is increasingly becoming the hub around which many campaigns now spin. It’s a shame many of the exhibitors at this year’s Ideal Home Show missed this point.

Rosemary McDonnell is Group Account Director at Sense.