Lessons from an experiential marketer: ROI, emotions and beyond

A few months ago, a senior meeting planner told me that it could be a good start for an events planner to work in an experiential marketing agency. At that moment, I did not quite understand it: why marketing if I do know I want to work in events?

Interestingly enough, some weeks later I had a guest lecture in my master’s degree from one of the leading experts in experiential marketing in London, Shaz Smilansky. I got her newly published book (Experiential Marketing: A practical guide to interactive brand experiences, 2009) and suddenly it all became clear. It really surprised me how much we can actually learn from them.

Why? Experiential marketing is all about creating experiences, just like us, although with different objectives. However, it’s a new discipline that has moved away from ‘its image as a tactical short-term solution’ to being a strategic tool, gaining more budget from the marketing department (does it sound familiar?) and has put a lot of effort in setting specific objectives and measuring the ROI of the campaigns. Any bells ringing now?

Well, let’s first start looking at the events that they create. Smilansky defines experiential marketing as a process of ‘identifying, satisfying customer needs and aspirations, profitably, by engaging them through two-way communications that bring brand personalities to life and add value to the target audience’s experience’. To think about your target market is the number one principle in marketing, and I assume that all of you do that already! However, the second part is more interesting, ‘two-way communications’, a.k.a. co-creation, interactivity, crowd sourcing or bottom-up.

Now, if you read my editorial titled ‘Interactivity: is it the ultimate solution to your (their) needs’, you might be thinking that this is a bit contradictory. Actually, my point there was that you need to take into consideration the needs of your audience and your objectives, and then decide what’s best. But all in all, I feel that there has been a big paradigm shift in the way that companies engage with consumers, and so the same applies to your event.

There’s also the learning part of the meeting. Smilansky points out that this shift is not only happening in marketing, but also in education ‘world-class educational experts are concluding in unison that when learning, the best way to truly understand and absorb information is through experiencing the problem, the process and the solution’.

Right. The second lesson about how they create experiences has to do with involving the audience ‘emotionally’, because ‘emotional stimuli can heighten memory retention by triggering neuro-chemical activity, affecting certain areas of the brain that are responsible for encoding and recalling’.

She gives different tips to achieve this emotional connection: the event has to be authentic, positively connected, personally meaningful, and have multi-sensory elements.

Katherine Simmons already wrote an article for M&IT back in 2008 about the effect of smells in events. She argued that, while pleasant smells can boost concentration and mental performance, unpleasant ones could have the opposite effect. And she adds ‘M&IT can confirm this foul stench is one emitted by human beings’. So you know what you have to include in the goody bag!

Back to the serious stuff, another interesting point for me is when Smilansky warns us that there are two kinds of experiential marketing agencies: the first one is more experienced in strategy, and the second one in the ‘activation’. In other words, some marketers are more focused on the content of the actual event and others are experts on the logistics. And well, there is a third but rare one, which is the full-service agency.

This totally reminds me to our case: so far, most of the event planners have been focused on the logistics (venue, transportation and F&B) but every time there are more meeting designers/architects, who focus on the content. To be honest, I don’t know if the same person should take care of everything or not. I’m guessing that it has something to do with the ambition and personal taste of each one, and the amount of resources available. If the meeting planner and meeting designer are the same person, then fewer meetings per year should be handled. If not, then there should be clear and constant communication between the two of them.

And the final lesson is related to the bottom line. Smilansky feels that experiential marketing campaigns have been criticized for the difficulty in measuring them because many marketers ‘overlook this crucial stage of planning’. Well, I can already tell you that the impacts of meetings and conferences are not easy to measure at all. But there are some initiatives out there (such as the Event ROI Institute or Meeting metrics) that are already working towards making it an easier process.

Again, Smilansky gives us some hints to make it more efficient: the objectives have to be specific and quantifiable, each measurement system has to be tailored to each event (although coming from some sort of standard) and it has to be decided during the planning stage.

Perhaps one of the most relevant teachings of Smilansky is that for her, the evaluation stage ‘is arguably one of the most important stages of the campaign cycle’. Now, how many events are currently evaluated through a one quick survey filled by the delegates, or not even that?

She further adds that ‘even if your strategy was fabulous [...], if you don’t effectively evaluate the campaign results then there is nothing tangible indicating that the campaign was successful’. Do you start to understand why experiential marketing’ budgets actually increased during the economic downturn, unlike the events’ one?

By Rosa Garriga

Tags: Event Magazine, events, Experiential marketing, Interactivity, learning, meeting design, ROI, strategy

Category: Advice for Event Management