HOLISTIC BRAND EXPERIENCES DR SOTIRIS T LALAOUNIS

& EMOTIONAL BRANDING

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Session Plan

• Provide an understanding of the phenomenal nature of experiences.

• Discuss the concepts of the experience economy and experiential marketing and explore
their characteristics.
• Explore the complex emotion of nostalgia and its characteristics.
• Provide an understanding of the use of nostalgia in marketing by discussing retro marketing
and retro branding.
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Module Overview
Developing Brand Equity, Positioning, Personality and Values
Identifying and Developing
Brand Plans
Strategic Brand Management Process

Creating Brand Identity: Brand Aesthetics and Symbolism

Brand Communications and the Attention Economy

Holistic Brand Experiences and Emotional Branding

Designing and Implementing
Brand Marketing Programmes Consumer Collectives, Brand Avoidance, and Political
Consumption

Brand Ethics, Social Responsibility, and Sustainable Consumption

Measuring and Interpreting

Brand Performance and Metrics
Brand Performance

Brand Growth:
Brand Architecture and Brand Extensions
Growing and Sustaining
Brand Equity
Brand Futures:
Technology and Innovation in Branding Strategies

(Lalaounis, 2020, based on Keller & Swaminathan, 2020)

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Understanding Experiences

Uniqueness of Experiences
• Etymologically: conscious, everyday, and life experiences.
• Time & context render every experience different despite some degree of similarity.
• An individual cannot have same experience twice.
• Experiences are unique between people – no two people can have same experience.
• Organisations cannot offer experiences but experiential platforms/context.

Experiences as Units
• Identify experiences as units – define beginning and end.
• Helps to understand and evaluate nature of experiences.

(Coxon, 2015; Pine II & Gilmore, 1998, 1999, 2011)

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Experience Economy

• New economic offering: personal and memorable experiences.

• “An experience is not an amorphous construct; it is as real an offering as any service, good or
commodity” (Pine II and Gilmore, 1999).
• Previous economic offerings remain outside the buyer.

• Experiences are personal - a result of interaction between the brand & the individual’s frame of mind.

• The company is the experience stager - the consumer is the guest.

• Organisations must deliberately design engaging experiences that command a ‘fee’.

• Organisations should uses its services as the stage and goods as props to engage an individual.

(Pine II & Gilmore, 1998, 1999, 2011)

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Experience Dimensions & Realms

Experience Dimensions
• Customer participation in experience (passive vs. active participation).

• Connection or environmental relationship that unites customers with the event or performance
(absorption vs. immersion).

Experience Realms
• Entertainment (passive participation and absorptive relationship).

• Educational (active participation and absorptive relationship).

• Escapist (active participation and immersive relationship).

• Aesthetic (passive participation and immersive relationship).

(Pine II & Gilmore, 1998)
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Experience Realms
Passive Participation Active Participation

Absorption
Entertainment Educational

SWEET
SPOT

Immersion

Aesthetic Escapist

(Pine II & Gilmore, 1999, 2011)

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Experiential Marketing
• “Customers take functional features & benefits, product quality and a positive brand image as given.
[They] want [brands] that dazzle their senses, touch their hearts,…stimulate their minds...that they
can relate to and that they can incorporate into their lifestyles” (Schmitt, 1999, p. 22).
• “…the experiential value [does] not…exist in the…products or services per se, but in the marketing of
these items” (Schmitt, 2011).
• Experience Economy vs Experiential Marketing:

Experience
Economy COMPANY MARKETING EXPERIENCES
concept

Experiential
EXPERIENTIALY PRODUCTS &
Marketing COMPANY
MARKETING SERVICES
concept
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Experiential Marketing Framework

ExPros SEMs

COMMUNICATIONS
SENSE
VISUAL & VERBAL IDENTITY
FEEL
PRODUCT PRESENCE
THINK HOLISTIC
CO-BRANDING BRAND
EXPERIENCE
ACT
SPATIAL ENVIRONMENTS
RELATE
DIGITAL MEDIA

PEOPLE

(based on Schmitt, 1999)

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Experience Providers
COMMUNICATIONS VISUAL & VERBAL Product Presence:
IDENTITY Product design,
Advertising, annual
packaging and brand
reports, and Names, logos and characters (Service:
publications signage Service design)

SPATIAL WEBSITES &

ENVIRONMENTS CO-BRANDING ELECTRONIC MEDIA
Events, sponsorship, Websites, digital
Building and exhibition
and product placement marketing, and social
design
media

PEOPLE
Employees and partners
(Schmitt, 1999)
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Strategic Experiential Modules (SEMs)
Five types of experiences

Sense
• Appeal to the five senses with the objective of creating sensory experiences.
• Stimulate and delight senses!
• Excite or please.

Feel
• Appeal to customer’s inner feelings & emotions with the objective of creating affective experiences.
• Face-to-face interactions: greatest source of emotions.
• Moods and basic & complex emotions.
• Create positive inwards and outward emotions – avoid negative emotions.

(Schmitt, 1999)
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Strategic Experiential Modules (SEMs)
Five types of experiences

Think
• Appeal to customer’s intellect – create cognitive experiences to engage customers creatively.
• Challenge deeply-held assumptions and beliefs and bring paradigm change.
• Surprise, intrigue, or provoke.

Act
• Aim to affect and enhance physical experiences, lifestyles, and interactions
• Demonstrate alternative ways of doing things.

Relate
• Contain aspects of the above but expand beyond them.
• Relate the individual to ideal self, other people, cultural groups, and create brand communities.

(Schmitt, 1999)
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Understanding Nostalgia
• Etymology: Nostos (return to home or one’s native land) + algos (pain, suffering, or grief).
• “A preference (general liking, positive attitude or favourable effect) towards experiences associated
with objects (people, places or things) that were more common (popular, fashionable or widely
circulated) when one was younger (in early adulthood, in adolescence, in childhood or even before
birth)” (Holbrook & Schindler, 2003, p. 108).
• Bittersweet emotion: combines connection to the past (pleasure, love, warm-heartedness) and sense
of loss (you can never go back to the past).
• Induce nostalgia but limit sense of loss.
• Medical, historical, psychological, and sociological phenomenon.
• Nostalgic about past experiences: childhood and early adolescence.
• Tendency to nostalgia varies over the course of a person’s lifetime.
• Allows a person to maintain his/her identity during transitional periods.
(Havlena & Holak, 1991)
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Orders & Types of Nostalgia
Orders of nostalgia
• Simple Nostalgia: ‘things were better in the past’ - a yearning for return.
• Reflexive Nostalgia: critically analyse the past - ‘was it really that way?’.
• Interpreted Nostalgia: critically analyse the nostalgic experience - ‘why am I feeling nostalgic?’.

Types of nostalgia
• Personal nostalgia: personal level - person reflects on his/her own experience.
• Communal nostalgia: societal level – triggered by epochal changes.
• Marketing intertwines personal and communal nostalgia (evoke former selves & former eras).

Nostalgic messages vs Nostalgia-based messages

• Nostalgic messages: rely on personal experiences – a person re-experiences aspects of his/her past.
• Nostalgia-based messages: experience collective past of society through fantasy.
(Davis, 1979; Havlena & Holak, 1991)
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Retro Marketing

Retro: combining the old with the new - usually old style with high
technology.
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Rise of Retro Marketing
Micro Reasons
• People live longer and are more inclined to retrospect and reminisce about their past.
• Creates a sense of community among city dwellers.
• Brands with long history and heritage can boast about it to gain competitive advantage.
• When facing difficulties, resurrect successful campaigns from the past.
• Softens the hard sell.
Macro Reasons
• Nostalgia is characteristic of societies experiencing turbulence and transformation.
• Nostalgia triggered by the rise of ecological concerns and emphasis on conservation and protection.
• People yearn for less stressful times due to fast pace of technological change.
• Global brands seek to communicate their contribution to local community.
• Stylistic innovation is impossible.
• Characteristic of post-modernism.
(Brown, 1999)
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Retro Branding
“The revival or re-launch of a product or service brand from a prior historical period, which
is usually but not always updated to contemporary standards of performance, functioning or
taste” (Brown et al., 2003a, p. 20).

CRITERIA FOR BRAND REVIVAL

Dormancy Iconicity Evocativeness

Utopianism Solidarity Perfectibility

(Brown et al., 2003b)

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4As of Retro Branding
Allegory
• Brand allegory is a symbolic story, narrative, or extended metaphor – consumers add to it.
• The story is dynamic – it can change in response to popular tastes and trends.

Arcadia
• Utopian sense of past worlds and communities – idealised brand community.
• Past is seen as a special, magical place.

Aura
• Authenticity is vital to branding - uniqueness is a required aspect of brand identity.
• Authenticity relates to brand essence - the core brand values – unique brand elements

Antinomy
• Intrinsic paradoxes: a simultaneous presence of old and new, traditional and contemporary.

(Brown et al., 2003a)

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Retro Branding
Creation & Management of Brand Meaning

• Retro brands contribute to creating and managing brand meaning:

• Allegory – brand story – the plot.
• Arcadia – the idealised brand community – the setting.
• Aura – the brand aura – the character.
• Antinomy – animates all dimensions.
• Retro brands will have a continuing appeal as a marketing strategy for two reasons:
• Eradicate first mover advantage by tapping into the wellsprings of consumer trust & loyalty toward
old brands.
• As communal nostalgia increases during chaotic times - the world will see more retro branding.
• Such paradoxes underpin the creative life force of the retro brand’s appeal.

(Brown et al., 2003a)

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Brand Antinomy
Animating all dimensions

ANTINOMY + 3A’S

Fiction ALLEGORY Truth

Clever Persuasions Brand Story Facts
Distant Copywriters =Plot Real Users

Alive AURA Not Alive

A personality Brand Essence A thing
A subject Character An Object

ARCADIA
Pseudo-Community Real Community
Idealised Community
Amoral Moral
Setting

(Lalaounis, 2020, based on Brown et al., 2003a)

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Extra Materials & Reading
Extra Materials:
• Week 5 Extra Notes (Word document) [Available on ELE].

Core Reading:
• Chapter 5 in Lalaounis, S.T. (2020). Strategic Brand Management and Development: Creating and Marketing
Successful Brands. London: Routledge.

Supplementary Reading:
• Brown, S. (1999). Retro-marketing: yesterday’s tomorrows, today!. Marketing Intelligence & Planning, 17(7), 363-376.
[Available on ELE]
• Brown, S., Kozinets, R. V., & Sherry Jr, J. F. (2003a). Teaching old brands new tricks: Retro branding and the revival
of brand meaning. Journal of Marketing, 67(3), 19-33. [Available on ELE]
• Pine II, B. J., & Gilmore, J. H. (1998). Welcome to the experience economy: As goods and services become
commoditised, the customer experiences that companies create will matter most. Harvard Business Review, 76, 97-
105. [Available on ELE]
• Schmitt, B. (1999). Experiential marketing. Journal of Marketing Management, 15(1-3), 53-67. [Available on ELE].
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References
• Brakus, J. J., Schmitt, B. H., & Zarantonello, L. (2009). Brand experience: What is it? How is it measured? Does it affect loyalty?. Journal of
Marketing, 73(3), 52-68.
• Brown, S. (1999). Retro-marketing: yesterday’s tomorrows, today!. Marketing Intelligence & Planning, 17(7), 363-376.
• Brown, S., Kozinets, R. V., & Sherry Jr, J. F. (2003a). Teaching old brands new tricks: Retro branding and the revival of brand meaning. Journal of
Marketing, 67(3), 19-33
• Brown, S., Kozinets, R. V., & Sherry, J. F. (2003b). Sell me the old, old story: Retromarketing management and the art of brand revival. Journal of
Customer Behaviour, 2(2), 133-147.
• Coxon I., (2015). Fundamental Aspects of Human Experience: A Phenomeno(logical) Explanation. In P. Benz. (Ed.), Experience design: concepts and
case studies. London: Bloomsbury.
• Davis, F. (1979). Yearning for yesterday: A sociology of nostalgia. New York: The Free Press.
• Havlena, W. J., & Holak, S. L. (1991). The Good old days: Observations on nostalgia and its role in consumer behavior. Advances in Consumer
Research, 18, 323-329.
• Hodder, I. (2012). Entangled: An archaeology of the relationships between humans and things. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons.
• Holbrook, M. B., & Schindler, R. M. (2003). Nostalgic bonding: Exploring the role of nostalgia in the consumption experience. Journal of Consumer
Behaviour, 3(2), 107-127.
• Lalaounis, S. T. (2020). Strategic brand management and development: Creating and marketing successful brands. London: Routledge.
• Pine II, B. J., & Gilmore, J. H. (1998). Welcome to the experience economy: As goods and services become commoditised, the customer experiences
that companies create will matter most. Harvard Business Review, 76, 97-105.
• Pine II, B. J., & Gilmore, J. H. (1999). The Experience Economy: Work is theatre & every business a stage. Cambridge: Harvard Business Press.
• Pine II, B. J., & Gilmore, J. H. (2011). The experience economy (Updated Edition). Cambridge: Harvard Business Press.
• Schmitt, B.H. (1999b). Experiential Marketing: How to get customers to sense, feel, think, act, relate. New York: The Free Press.
• Schmitt, B.H. (2011). Experience Marketing: Concepts, frameworks and consumer insights (Vol. 5, No. 2). Boston: Now Publishers.
DR SOTIRIS T LALAOUNIS