For years, advertisers and marketers have used experiential marketing – or marketing a product through customer experiences – to deepen customer engagement. More recently, savvy marketing departments like the ones at Taco Bell and Oscar Mayer are embracing a bolder take on this practice, attempting to attract their brand audience to a specific place of their choosing, using increasingly more bizarre and publicity-worthy tactics. This practice of experiential marketing, creating offline brand experiences to deepen consumer engagement and brand affinity, has been picking up steam for many years now and is quickly becoming commonplace.
Take the Taco Bell Hotel, for example. It may not seem like an obvious choice for a fast food restaurant, but the company announced in May that they would be opening a hotel in Palm Springs, California in August of 2019. When reservations opened up June 27th, the rooms sold out in two minutes. Busch took the pop-up idea to the next level by introducing a hidden “Pop Up Schop” inside a national park in an undisclosed location. Fans who found the brew garden were entered to win a lifetime supply of beer. Extra points to Busch because this campaign was developed in partnership with the National Forest Foundation, and they have committed to planting trees in a national forest. Oscar Mayer erected a Weinermobile that you can rent out on AirBnB, Cheetos created an entire Cheetos Mansion in São Paulo, Brazil, and Taco Bell and T-Mobile created pop-up stores for their fans to gather, enjoy free merchandise, meet stars, and overall just experience the T-MoBell world.
What these brands are doing is bringing their fans together and creating communities, shared experiences in real life. They are giving them a physical space to gather, outside of the typical retail location, that belongs exclusively to fans of the brand. This reflects a larger shift toward companies encouraging their audience to live the lifestyle of their brands. And consumers are all too eager to comply.
Using experiential marketing successfully takes time, planning, and a lot of creativity. But the returns can be phenomenal. Here’s how to get started:
Find ways to get your audience together in an unexpected location.
It is easy to get stuck within the perimeter of your organization without realizing how limiting this can be. How can you make your audience mobile and take your mission elsewhere? Think of hobbies or spaces that unite your audience outside of your organization or company. If you’re an ocean advocacy nonprofit, your audience may be interested in attending your organization’s own surfing competition. Oscar Mayer’s Weinermobile will be parked within walking distance of Lollapalooza, acknowledging that their fans have an interest in the music festival.
Make it a little exclusive
Exclusivity doesn’t mean blocking admission from anyone, but rather, emphasizing that the event is for “true fans” ups the ante slightly, and makes your audience feel a bit more special. This can be as simple as a password needed to attend the event that you reveal over social media or a time limit. For these larger companies like T-Mobile and Busch, this has proved successful. The T-MoBell shops are only open for three days, and the Pop Up Schop reveal took place over just two days on the brand’s Twitter. To get a reservation at the Taco Bell Hotel, you had to be ready to hit ‘purchase’ as soon as the clock struck 1 p.m.
Don’t be afraid to get creative
As far as publicity is concerned, as long as you aren’t veering off-brand, the stranger the location-based event, the better. Why would anyone stay in an Oscar Mayer Weinermobile? Because it is strange, it’s exclusive, and it got great PR.
Utilize social media when you do it
The role of Twitter in Busch’s Pop Up Schop is clear, but social media networks are also at play in these other campaigns. Social media is a great way to disperse information to your audience quickly, and keeps your remote fans engaged even if they can’t be at the location. Because the T-MoBell pop-up stores were only in three US cities, the company made sure to have giveaways on their Twitter for their far-away fans.
Work in your mission
Lastly, don’t just gather people together for no reason. Have the event hold some significance for either your audience or your mission. Getting people to a specific location is the hard part, but what they do or learn there is the important part. Busch offered a lifetime of free beer, which mattered to the individual who won, and they also planted 100 trees in a national park, which matters to everyone.
