Festival Fever: Four brand activation for UK’s biggest festival year

festival brand activation

The UK festival scene is well and truly back. Festival organisers reported record growth in 2022, returning to pre-pandemic levels.

Mintel reported that 21% of UK consumers visited a music festival in the 12 months leading up to March 2022. Included in that were over 49% of all 16 – 24-year-olds. YouGov claim that half of all festival-goers (53%) are open to getting involved in brand experiences at festivals.

With COVID concerns firmly behind us and the surprise addition of the Eurovision Song Contest into music fans’ calendars, 2023 is set to be the UK’s biggest year for festivals ever. All of this is good news for brands looking to create memorable experiences with a captive festival audience.

Festival brand activations that make an impact

However, festivals are incredibly congested places for brands, with brands not only competing against each other but also the headline acts that are truly the main event. It’s becoming increasingly harder for brands to stand out in this environment but from our vast experience, we understand the key ingredients that make your festival brand activations shine brighter.

We know how to create experiences that lead to story-sharing and memory-making festival moments, which create campaign reach and increased brand love well beyond the boundaries of the campsite.

Download our guide to plan your festival experiences

Our Festival Fever: Four tips to help brands stand out in the UK’s biggest festival year guide contains key elements to bear in mind whilst planning your festival activity. You can request to download using the form below to read more about the following:

  1. Be clear in your message. What’s the one thing you want to convey to festival attendees?
  2. Consider your location wisely. Make sure the context is right for your brand where to show up on site
  3. Enhance the festival experience. Consider need-states and add value through useful experiences
  4. Create a destination. Make festival-goers feel that your activation is a landmark in its own right

Complete the form below to receive the guide:

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Discover our latest guides to help brighten your brand experience strategy here at The Futures Lab

Connect with us

London

5th Floor Century House
100 Oxford Street
London
W1D 1LN

New York

243 E 14th
#2 C/O SQ
New York
NY 10003

Downloads

Discover our latest guides to help brighten your brand experience strategy here at The Future Lab

Connect with us

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Experiential

Whether it be Festivals, Trade Shows, PR Stunts, Installations or Pop Ups to name a few, we believe brand experiences are one of the most powerful forms of marketing to impact consumer perception and attitude towards a brand. They can create real behaviour change when born out of a deep consumer insight allied to a compelling idea. And it’s these fundamentals we look to get right whatever the live, virtual or hybrid task in hand.

Sampling.

Sampling is all too often perceived as an unsophisticated, somewhat ‘blunt’ marketing tool. Over the last 16 years Sense has pioneered a set of strategic principles which underpin our unique approach to sampling and which are highly measurable from both an ROI and consumer behaviour change perspective. We will happily guide brands through the myriad of sampling channels and products available so whether it’s mass face to face sampling, in offices, digitally, at home or just a strategic framework that you are after, we can provide a blend of tactics to fulfil both brand and sales objectives.

Retail.

With many clients now focused on activating in channels more closely associated with a sale, our heavyweight retail experience closes the loop on a typical shopper journey by encompassing the moment of truth in store. Be it prize promotions, shopper toolkits, key visual creation, path-to-purchase communications, category strategy, B2B campaigns or Amazon optimisation, our goal is to create forward-thinking retail experiences that deliver demonstrable brand value. We aim to make ‘retail fail’ a thing of the past for ambitious brands looking to thrive is an ever-competitive landscape and believe our streamlined team is perfectly placed to do this.

Foresight.

Knowing what will keep a brand bright, exciting, and vital means we need to keep one step ahead of the curve. Our thought leadership hub, The Futures Lab, helps us to understand the marketing trends of tomorrow. It’s also the origin of strategies and methodologies which have created over 65 award-winning campaigns. 

Rigour.

Creativity is nothing without results. And we know that commissioning bold concepts, capable of changing minds, requires reassurance that it’s the right thing to do. 

Data, insights, and research precedes every campaign we do, and our proprietary measurement tool, EMR, gives us a decade of campaign performance metrics. Which is why we’re proud to have been recognised as industry-leading by brands like The Economist, Coca-Cola, and Molson Coors. 

Trust.

We believe brand experience is inherently more varied than other forms of marketing. No formula, no template, no cookie-cutter approach – and often no precedent. 

That’s why, Sense places trust at the heart of its business – grounded in teamwork between our people and yours. Our processes are efficient, our senior team stay involved and our partnership mentality had helped us sustain powerful client relationships, some lasting over 10 years.