This week I have a fantastic Guest Post by Marek Wolski.
Marek currently works as a Project Manager for experiential agency The Taboo Group in Melbourne.
He describes himself as very curious marketeer and has been digging around in the digital arena for a while now...
With a Commerce marketing degree under his belt and a Law degree hanging (incomplete) overhead, he has unleashed a passsion for problem solving and idea generation on all projects he can get his hands on.
He has recently started his blog aptly named 'The Forest Through The Trees' which you can find here: http://throughthetrees.tumblr.com/
His post talks us through the combination of digital with the physical/real world (aka experiential)...Take it away Marek:
Zoe kindly let me enter the fray of blogging with a post here.
As an amateur blogger (oxymoron perhaps?) I thought I should try to keep it short.
I want to share my thoughts on integrating experiential campaigns with seamless offline real world experiences and digital interactions, which enhance each other. I was inspired by some consumer psychology and Playground (a recent Swedish campaign).
Working at an experiential agency and writing on a digital blog may seem counter intuitive. Therein lies a problem. Experiential campaigns like all others need to integrate digital elements, as digital needs to integrate offline take-away components.
“Integration – wow, what a innovative concept you speak of”. Yes I know, I learnt about it once at uni. Today, integration seems to be about creating consequential campaigns. Go to the launch party, see the TVC, get the sample at the train station, go home and online, see the banner, remember all that other stuff, click the website and voila, you’ve arrived….What? Did you miss a step? Do you suddenly not understand the online interaction because you skipped the launch experience to go to the pub to watch Le Tour?
As someone in our office says daily (which is way too often) “marketing fail”.
Consumer psychology and behaviour show how simultaneous messages reinforce learning. Experiential learning theory has 4 states, which, when translated into basic language boil down to: feeling, watching, thinking, doing. These can happen simultaneously in an instant or consequentially (usually but not always in the above order).
The problem with many current campaigns is that they cannot teach the consumer about the brand if, as in the above example, they miss a step in the learning process. They will have missed a critical piece of information diluting the information into meaninglessness. Campaigns that are able to address all four states simultaneously with offline/online experiences enhance the message cognition and thus the brand preference.
Technology is a factor in creating deliverable solutions to clients. Today we have mobile, AR, social media etc to help deliver simultaneous digital real world experience. The caveat to all this was explained by Wunderman’s (@wunderman) tweet last week “Misconception: That the fundamentals are no longer required because everything is digital. So wrong”. The way in which the interaction flows between off- and online needs to be a focus on the consumer psychology rather than the technology. A consumer behaviour orientation (rather than technology orientation) means each medium can reach the full potential of itself and of the partnership with the other.
An additional challenge is enticing people from the online back to the real world, which would neatly tie-off the learning process (if it started offline). This is not just the case in experiential but in many direct-response digital campaigns.
An example of how to do all this comes from Sweden. The home of conceptual learning and experiential marketing – just think of Ikea or H&M. Agency Åkestam Holst in Stockholm created an experiential campaign which ran live for 3 days and included simultaneous offline/online experiences and participation and despite its heavy use of technology, created an effective sales driver and rather simple (from a consumer perspective) experience.
The campaign’s results include lasting positive brand preference, new customer acquisition and sales…
Hmm. It seems this post has turned into a rehashed version of digital shops’ mantra: digital is not an add-on. But nothing should be an add-on, it should all happen and work simultaneously.
Video link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AjGpMwc1YQ
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