Experiential marketing: The consistent brand experience

Liz Bigham
Admap
July/August 2011
 
 

   Title: Experiential marketing: The consistent brand experience

   Author(s): Liz Bigham
   Source: Admap
   Issue: July/August 2011
 

The consistent brand experience

Liz Bigham
Jack Morton Worldwide, New York

There are myriad touchpoints for consumers to engage with your brand. it is essential
that these experiences deliver a consistent brand perception.
Depending on whom one consults, this is either a profoundly exciting or a deeply terrifying time to be in marketing. The deeply
terrified marketers look at the proliferation of new media channels and user-generated content and see a frightening loss of
control.

'Oh no,' the thinking goes, 'now consumers can choose when and where they want to engage with my brand. They can choose
to ignore my marketing altogether. They can use social media as a megaphone and talk about my brand in ways I don't like.'

On the other side are those of us who are more sanguine about the state of brand marketing, because we believe perpetual
innovation means new ways to engage and to gain an edge. And those of us who work in the brand experience space would
go even further, and say to our terrified colleagues: "Not only should you not be afraid of these 'new' conditions, you should
know that they're not actually new at all – experiential marketers have always dealt with them."

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As anyone who has ever worked in the experiential space can tell you, live events and brand experiences mimic many of the
conditions of control we associate with 'new' media. Consumers have always been able to choose whether or not to attend
brand events. When they do show up, they require attention (a lot more attention than those people watching your World Cup
ad). And they might even say rude things about you to their peers, shifting attention from the easy top-down brand message
and forcing a more challenging dialogue between the brand and its constituencies.

One might quibble with this analogy, yet there are valuable lessons to be learned from the experts in brand experience –
lessons that can be applied by those marketers grappling with challenges in maintaining brand consistency across the
spectrum of touch-points available today. Their lessons might also assuage fears among those in the deeply terrified set, too.
So here are five lessons in achieving brand consistency in the brand experience space:

1. Your brand is a verb, not a noun

There's a vital distinction between understanding your brand as a static thing or things (eg name or brandmark) and
understanding it as a promise delivered – that is, as an experience, defined by how you actually behave towards your
customers, employees and other stakeholders. If you think your brand is a noun, you are likely to be among those
marketers who fear loss of control. But if you understand that your brand is a verb, you recognise that no matter what
changes to our media landscape might occur, brands will always have control over how they behave. This emphasis on
'doing' versus 'telling', on brands walking their talk and delivering what they promise, has always been a primary focus in
the brand experience space, and it is becoming increasingly evident elsewhere. Think back to last year's fracas over the
gap's failed attempt to redesign its logo. What bothered people more than the lacklustre logo (the noun) was how the gap
waffled its launch (the verb).

2. You have to decide that your brand is worth the investment

It's obvious but worth emphasising: only those companies that decide their brands are important enough to merit the
investment (not always of money, but certainly of thinking, time and ip) will be able to achieve consistency across
experiential touchpoints. It takes effort and dedication to maintain a thread of consistency across any media, but
especially live (given the variables) and digital (given all the possible iterations). Brands that excel have invested the time
in thinking through their brand experience at every level. Beyond the obvious big brand examples – the apple and Zappos
types – there are smaller exemplars of consistency and clarity across touchpoints. Zipcar has a famously coherent brand
that shines through every aspect of its car-sharing experience, from online to mobile to the owned media branding inside
the company's cars.arguably, this consistency of experiential branding helped the company to beat expectations for its
recent ipo (despite having never made a profit).

3. Owned media matters more (and often costs less) than other media
Brands that devote a lot of attention to their experiences tend to be masters of owned media.'owned media' is typically
defined as one part of a media trinity comprising paid, earned and owned media. Owned media is the realm of
experience, comprising experiences orchestrated by the company to send a message to consumers through channels it
controls (proprietary events, retail, staff, website). Paid media relies on a message delivered from a company to
consumers by paying to leverage a channel not controlled by the company (above-the-line advertising). Earned media
depends on messages about a company passed between consumers as a result of an experience with brand (PR, social
media).

One of the advantages of owned media is that beyond a company's ability to control the experience it creates, great

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owned media experiences often generate a healthy dose of earned media, through social and other channels. Think of
CocaCola's 'Happiness Machine', a live stunt in which a Coke vending machine delivered surprising moments of
happiness and delight to unsuspecting consumers. The experience touched only a handful of consumers live, but
extended to millions online through the resulting viral sharing.

4. People and behaviour are fundamental to the brand experience

As a brand experience agency, one of the assumptions we have about any live interaction is that there will be people
present who are being asked or paid to represent the brand. As a matter of course, these people always go through
training so that they know what they need to do, and how they need to behave, to deliver the right kind of experience. It's
like media training in the PR world: you wouldn't send executives out to talk to the media without equipping them to do so,
would you? So of course you wouldn't consider doing that for the people who represent your brand live, whether it's for a
one-time event, an ongoing experiential campaign or an enduring experiential touchpoint, such as a retail environment.
Taken further, just as media training and talking points are the tools that brands use to guarantee message consistency
in the PR space, providing brand behaviour guidelines to the people who represent you live will go a long way toward
ensuring consistency across experiential touchpoints. That's why we think brands should have guidelines that go beyond
how to use the logo correctly to address on-brand behaviours (less creepy and corporate than it sounds, as we hope our
own Brand Book demonstrates – see www.jackmorton.com/ orange/pages/Brand_Book.pdf).

5. Consumers don't distinguish between online and experiential, so neither should you
I recently heard a story about someone going to a bricks-and-mortar store to buy a product that he had seen advertised
at a discount at the same brand's online store, only to be told that the brand couldn't honour the price because the stores
are different. Needless to say, he walked out empty-handed, and the brand lost not just a sale but a customer for the
long-term. The obvious lesson is that consumers don't draw a distinction between a brand's online and live experiences,
so you shouldn't either. Physical experiences should complement, not contradict, digital ones. At the most basic level, this
means consumers should encounter the same reality from one to the other: the same brand and messaging, the same
products and prices, the same services and sales and the same ability to engage and interact. Too often, experiences
designed to engage consumers at the brand or product level don't carry through to the retail level, either on-site or as a
follow-up. That is likely to be dramatically improved with all the new technologies (like near-field communication and QR
codes) that make smartphones a powerful shopping tool at the brand experience level.and to bring the argument right
back to where we started, the fact that this shopping tool is controlled by the consumer gives brands all the more reason
to get this experience right.

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Coca-Cola hosted a 125th anniversary celebration concert at Centennial Olympic Park in Atlanta

So, what does it look like when brands really succeed in delivering a consistent set of positive experiences that deliver on the
promise? and, conversely, when they don't get it right? First, the underperformers. Sadly, there are entire industry categories
where consumers' experiences fail to deliver. As a rule, mobile service providers are among the biggest marketing spenders,
and they generate a lot of brilliant advertising and brand communications. But walk into a mobile brand's retail store, or call its
customer service line, and prepare to be frustrated.

A different, but perhaps more flagrant, example concerns most professional sports teams in the us. Their ads are inspiring, and
sometimes the teams even win – yet the stadium experience is pretty dreadful.With ticket costs out of many fans' reach and
broadcast options getting better and more prolific, sports brands face an inevitable choice: either make the live experience
worth the cost and consistent with the promise, or lose attendance. The overachievers are a happier tale. They are, happily,
quite numerous, and can be found across categories. Red Bull has an aggressive calendar of brand experiences all linked by
a common thread of brand humour and adventure. As a brand, it invested aggressively and early in live brand experiences in
lieu of ATL ads. Over time, it has evolved a robust experiential portfolio that includes quirky branded events, such as the
Flugtag; smart and strategic sponsorships and activation; and a very brass-tacks sampling initiative that is delivered with few
bells and whistles but consistently and with apparent cost-effectiveness.

A very different example is business-to-business megabrand IBM. One of the most respected companies in the world, IBM is
exemplary for having maintained a strong brand even as it has continuously redefined its business. Behind this evolution lies
great experience brand thinking. The company is famous for its focus on employees as the voice of its brand, and was an
early advocate of new employee alignment channels.

For example, its Beehive internal social networking site gives its employees a way to connect, as well as an invitation to
contribute ideas. Externally, IBM has done a terrific job of focusing its client conversations around themes like 'Smarter Planet',
which serve as the compelling rallying cry for high-profile client events, such as the 'Smarter Cities' events staged in cities
worldwide, which have been awarded a Global Effie Award for marketing effectiveness.

So what does that mean in sheer business terms? To cite just one metric, IBM's focus and consistency around its brand
experience has paid off in brand valuation: this year, it maintained its status as the second most valuable brand in the world,
ranked by Interbrand's Best Global Brands, with a 7% increase in brand value. Simultaneously, ge, a great business-to-
business brand that has grappled with issues of consistency of focus, saw its brand ranking drop and its brand valuation
decline by 10%.

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