What is Experiential Marketing?
Key points for understanding experiential marketing
At its core, experiential marketing is about crafting the experience of the consumer - designing for momentary experiences, while baking in long-term memory considerations. Given these aims, a neuroscientific perspective is crucial
Experiential design, a component of experiential marketing, utilizes multi-sensory perception, psychological schema, and interactivity in order to help craft the moment-to-moment experience
At the same time, experimental marketing must be concerned with the overall memory and brand impression, and should optimize using features like The Peak-End Effect, and emotional salience
Marketing is fundamentally concerned with the actions of the consumer. Store traffic and site traffic. Clicks and Conversions. Pilots and Purchases. Wherever you look, behavior is business.
These are all no doubt important objectives. But what about designing for the consumer’s experience itself? Put another way, what is experiential marketing?
Experiential Marketing is the study and practice of creating consumer experiences within the context of branded activations. It has two central aims:
1) designing a moment-to-moment experience through a physical, interactive, and multi-sensory expression of the brand personality
2) creating an enduring impression, which deepens the feelings toward the brand
The range of possible experiences is nearly endless. How can brands ground their thinking in order to accomplish these two aims? Given the focus on the direct, inner experience of the consumer, taking a neuroscientific perspective is crucial. With that lens, let’s visit both of the aims of experiential marketing in turn.
Experiential Design Meets Experiential Marketing
First up, the experience itself. We can think of a branded, experiential activation as a sculpture. Creating it takes discipline, a long-term vision, and a heavy dose of creativity. When it’s is crafted just the right way, it’s a work of art that has a lasting impression on the consumer. It can transform the way they think and feel about the brand.
The experiential marketer is a sculptor of inner experience. What then, is the clay? There are several types of “raw material” at their disposal:
Multi-sensory experiences: The beauty of experiential marketing is that it can provide an immersive experience not otherwise possible in the digital world. And in constructing this, marketers are liberated above and beyond the simple, most dominant senses of vision and sounds. What does the experience taste, smell, and feel like?
Theme, Schema, and Storytelling: While the 5 senses are the basic building blocks of perceptual experience, humans are not merely sensory creatures. We are association machines, which come to any new experience with our own expectations, as well as the ability to pick up on patterns. In sum, the designer needs to consider the psychological schema, and the overarching theme of the experience. It’s here where the experiential designer is also a storyteller.
Consumer Interactivity: Experiential marketing should tantalize the senses and create a story for the consumers to piece together. However, it shouldn’t just be a spectator sport; consumers can also dive in and engage with the environment. The possibilities are endless. This isn’t just a fun way to interact with the brand - as we’ll soon see, it’s also crucial for building memories.
Memory Design Meets Experiential Marketing
In experiential marketing, memory is absolutely crucial. Imagine creating the most amazing, engaging, mind-bending, and enjoyable experience. But the minute the consumer goes back home and turns on Netflix, they’ve forgotten all about it. The most incredible experience imaginable means very little if it’s quickly forgotten. The true value of experiential marketing is creating experiences that are not only enjoyable in the moment but also memorable in the long term.
And it turns out, there’s a science to this; this is where the neuroscientific perspective shines. As discussed in Blindsight, not all experiences are equally memorable, and there are specific things that can be baked into the experience to boost the strength of being recalled later. These include:
Emotion: Can you remember the last time you had a dull bowl of oatmeal for breakfast? Probably not. If the experience doesn’t produce a strong emotional response - either good or bad - the brain assumes it’s not worth remembering. Extremely positive experiences are important to remember so we can try to repeat them. Extremely negative experiences are equally important to remember in order to avoid them. It’s the monotonous oatmeal that’s safely dismissed.
The Peak-End Effect: Emotional intensity is crucial, but real art comes from timing it. It turns out that two elements are weighed most heavily when it comes to the overall memory of how enjoyable an experience was: the “peak” of the experience; the highlight, and the ending of the experience. Everything else dissipates to the background.
Interactivity: An interactive brand experience can produce enjoyment at the moment, but research indicates that it’s crucial for memory formation as well. Experiences that allow consumers to ‘get their hands dirty’ (either figuratively, literally, or both), are much more likely to be remembered later, as these engage our focus, strain our attention, and produce embodied learning.
Experiential Marketing as the Future of Marketing
As we’ve seen, a neuroscientific approach to experiential design is crucial for in-person, physical engagement. It’s just as important when it comes to the phygital environments, and even more important in completely digital ones. Whether it’s virtual or augmented reality, The Metaverse, or another emerging technological landscape, at its core, the value comes from the same two sources: 1) how it bends the human experience, and 2) the impressions it creates. The context changes, but the brain’s fundamental features are constant.
Understanding the interaction between technology and consumer psychology is crucial. Research, for example, has begun to indicate that the brain often has a hard time compartmentalizing virtual experiences. In one experiment conducted at Stanford, middle school children were brought into the lab, put on a VR headset, and virtually swam with dolphins for about 20 minutes.
A few months later, they were bought back to the lab and asked about their experience. A significant portion of the children actually misremembered that they had actually swum with dolphins in real life! It’s worth keeping in mind that this experiment was conducted back in 2010 when VR was relatively prosaic. How much more can modern virtual experiences warp our impressions and memories?
As excitement about the digital world continues, experiential design is crucial in order for these technologies to be fully harnessed. The more sophisticated the technology, the more important it is for it to be grounded in the neuroscience of experience.
Photo by Alina Grubnyak via unasplash
About the author
Matt Johnson, PhD is a researcher, writer, and consumer neuroscientist focusing on the application of psychology to branding. He is the author of the best-selling consumer psychology book Blindsight, and Branding That Means Business (Economist Books, Fall 2022). Contact Matt for speaking engagements, opportunities to collaborate, or just to say hello
References for Applying Neuroscience to Experiential Marketing
Cockburn, A., Quinn, P., & Gutwin, C. (2015, April). Examining the peak-end effects of subjective experience. In Proceedings of the 33rd annual ACM conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 357-366).
Do, A. M., Rupert, A. V., & Wolford, G. (2008). Evaluations of pleasurable experiences: The peak-end rule. Psychonomic bulletin & review, 15, 96-98.
Geng, X., Chen, Z., Lam, W., & Zheng, Q. (2013). Hedonic evaluation over short and long retention intervals: The mechanism of the peak–end rule. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 26(3), 225-236.
