Experiential Marketing; Creative Ideas from Vanity Fair and Frito Lay

Challenge: Customers want to be actively involved in their own brand experiences. To meet this demand companies are developing innovative experiential marketing campaigns utilizing the virtually limitless opportunities of multichannel engagement. These new strategies are giving both existing and new customers a reason to take action.

Though most viewers may have been focused on the dresses and the winners pulled from those closely guarded envelopes, Vanity Fair magazine saw the Oscar Awards as an opportunity to engage its readers through an experiential event known as “the Vanity Fair Social Club”. The virtual event was created to allow more than 120 bloggers and online reporters to connect with customers using the specific event hash tag. The magazine plans to use this type of experiential marketing strategy for other major events.

Vanity Fair is on the right track because today’s customers want more than traditional push marketing interactions, this according to a new report on Experiential Marketing from CrossMark and MarketingWerks.

• 88 percent of shoppers say that if they enjoy an experiential interaction with a product they'll add it to their shopping list.

• Eighty percent said they prefer brands that “interact" with them over those that just “advertise" to them.

• Seven out of 10 shoppers say they'll share a positive brand experience.

ERDM Voice of Customer (VoC) research has confirmed this finding. Across the last 12 months, there has been a consistent trend that has emerged from thousands of hours of research conducted for major Fortune brands;

• Today, the starting point for marketing campaigns should be to understand how your customers define high value Customer Experiences with your specific brand.

Last year when Frito Lays asked customers to "Do us a flavor" over 3.8 million people said yes in just 12 weeks with entry submissions. The goal of the campaign was to turn around a 6 year decline and connect with younger consumers. The campaign was based on insight that consumers wanted to create, share, and get recognized. So a contest was created to demonstrate to customers that their voice indeed mattered. An engagement tool from start to finish, the contest allowed customers to submit new flavors, share them on Facebook, vote on the finalists and then pick the ultimate winner by purchasing samples of the 3 finalist flavors in stores.

Through the Do Us a Flavor campaign the company achieved;

• A 1%+ increase in household penetration

• And, a 2%+ increase among millennials.

5 Takeaways:

Here are 5 strategies that Frito Lay used to keep customers engaged:

1. Understand how your customers want to structure their buying experience and the level of involvement they demand within that experience.

2. Be committed to doing the research necessary to identify engagement “unknowns” that may have been previously overlooked such as media avenues, social interaction, and in-store experiential marketing.

3. Realize that today’s multichannel consumer is in more places (often simultaneously) than ever before. Be accessible in cross media avenues.

4. Always look at what you are doing through the eyes of your customer. Let both existing customers and prospects identify with your brand. Make them feel understood.

5. Look at both your current and future audiences in order to connect with the audiences that will continue to support the brand down the road.

6 Multichannel Takeaways from Best Buy’s Marketing

Challenge: Marketers are having a tough time maintaining engagement with today’s multichannel, multi-device consumers.

According to ShopperTrack, which uses a network of 60,000 shopper-counting devices to track visits at malls and large retailers across the country, retailers got only about half the holiday traffic in 2013 as they did just three years earlier. However, online sales increased by more than double the rate of brick-and-mortar sales this holiday season. According to the study, while shoppers visited an average five stores per mall trip in 2007, today they only visit three.

One company that understands this is Best Buy. While the company’s online sales of $1.32 billion for this past holiday season were up 23.5% from a year earlier, it was not enough to pull out a win overall due to lower in store sales. Chief Financial Officer Sharon McCollam noted in a conference call with analysts that expanding the company’s online presence will be a top priority in 2014.

The company has also made great strides in moving into the mobile space.  Amy Halford, senior digital brand manager of interactive marketing and emerging media at Best Buy noted in an interview, “we have the opportunity to better connect and be relevant to customers whenever, wherever they might seek us.“

6 Takeaways:

Here are 6 lessons Best Buy learned by listening to their multichannel customers. These can help you as well:

1. Keep customers’ rapidly changing needs and behaviors at the forefront of your strategies.

2. Provide the capability to easily research products and connect with you. This is critically important to customers. Many want to do more than simply transact.

3. Customers expect a consistent experience regardless of which entry point they access, be it online, phone, or store. 

4. Test frequently, learn quickly, and scale appropriately.

5. Reinforce all marketing efforts across media channels, including those conducted for specific audiences, such as Spanish language campaigns.

6. It’s critical to focus on meeting customer needs from a multichannel perspective, and not focus solely on growing a particular channel.

Macy’s Rewards Customers for Providing Tracking Permission

Challenge: New technology allows companies to track consumer’s every move. However, caution must be taken to ensure that permission is gained before tracking commences.

In a new IBM study of more than 30,000 consumers it was found that consumers are willing to share their personal information if they feel they receive value in exchange;

» The percentage of consumers willing to share their current location via GPS with retailers nearly doubled year-over-year to 36 percent.

» 38 percent of consumers would provide their mobile number for the purpose of receiving text messages and 32 percent would share their social handles with retailers.

This same sentiment has been confirmed in our Voice of Customer (VoC) research for Fortune brands regarding willingness to opt-in based on Reciprocity of Value expectations.

Macy’s opt-in based multichannel customer engagement

Today’s customers are multichannel. Therefore marketers have to follow their lead.

Macy’s PromoAlert program allows customers to opt-in to receive push marketing via email or text as well as through an Android or iPhone mobile app. Additionally the company allows customers to opt-in to receive information on specific events, bridal registries, and more.

Macy’s has also begun testing Shopkick, an iBeacon/BLE-based Bluetooth signal at its Herald Square, New York and Union Square, San Francisco stores. The app automatically welcomes shoppers as they enter a store and shows location-specific deals, discounts, recommendations and rewards. The app can also tie in at-home browsing to an in-store benefit—if a shopper “likes” a specific product in the app. The Shopkick technology ties into the retailer’s own app.

The company has established complete transparency in their opt-in mobile tracking technology. Macy’s offers details on their PromoAlert program on their web that allows customers to both sign-up or opt-out.

4 Takeaways:

1. It cannot be emphasized enough that transparency is essential in order to get active opt-in from customers.

2. Retailers need to develop all tracking technologies in a way that preserves trust and delivers personalized benefits in exchange for their willingness to provide increasingly deeper levels of personal information.

3. Improve customer loyalty through personalized brand experiences. Customers who opt in expect that the information they receive will dramatically enhance and improve their overall experience.

4. Integrate digital and physical stores to enable a seamless shopping experience for customers. Every aspect of your marketing needs to reinforce your overall brand and customer experience.