brand discovery

Rrrrrrrr, drum roll please! Your brand activation is about to kick off. Here’s what you can expect during your experiential marketing campaign.

CAMPAIGN MANAGEMENT
Each of our brand activations is led in the field by a dedicated experience manager or tour manager. Even if the experience is self-guided with technology assistance, staffing is a critical component to overseeing the management of your campaign. Your brand activation staff have many responsibilities, depending on the scope of your experience. Tasks include:

  • Production, set up and tear down
  • Inventory management and tracking (picking up items at a warehouse/storage unit, as well as asset counting, sorting and distribution)
  • Driving campaign vehicles and taking responsibility of campaign media formats
  • In-market research for guerrilla marketing locations, local news or better audience understanding
  • Venue point-of-contact
  • Testing event technology or measurement devices
  • Brand ambassador training and management
  • Team attire and costumes
  • And of course, being excellent representatives of your brand

The experience manager(s) orchestrates the overall brand activation. Everyone, including those of us at corporate, looks to the field staff for cues and in-market knowledge during the entire campaign flight.

AUDIENCE ENGAGEMENT
Your brand activation is about sharing the spotlight with your audience participants. One by one, they experience your brand, participate in your brand story and more deeply come to understand your brand personality.

While there are a wide variety of types of brand experiences, each is designed to directly interact with your audience.

During the one-to-one audience engagements, our staff:

  • Represent your brand with authenticity and relevance
  • Deliver short, key brand speaking points
  • Encourage full participation with the brand activation
  • Assist the audience through the experience
  • Strike up meaningful conversation with attendees
  • Distribute samples or swag

While the objective may change, each brand activation is designed to:

  • Immerse your audience
  • Provide interactive opportunities and activities for your audience
  • Elicit multiple senses among your audience
  • Evoke a certain emotional reaction from your audience
  • Drive deeper brand-to-consumer relationships
  • Motivate consumer behavior and action

Experiential marketing stirs brand love, so your audience and you are composing a ballad together.

IN-THE-FIELD ADJUSTMENTS
Sometimes, there might be a piece to the campaign that’s a bit off-key. Nothing a little tuning won’t fix! This could be as simple as finding a better way to queue waiting participants or as significant as changing a key experience element. When guerrilla marketing efforts are at play, it could mean a deviation from the pre-planned route in order to move to a more preferred location. As soon as we identify a way to improve upon performance, we make those adjustments.

You can plan for almost everything, but there are usually a few small things you cannot predict or plan for until you’re on-site. Many times, our brand activations are charting new waters, so we allow the necessary room to adjust during the campaign.

Yes, weather is one of them! While we like to sing in the rain, severe weather conditions can certainly impact our brand activation. Hurricanes have, indeed, affected our schedule in the past. For less severe but still annoying rain showers or wind gusts, there may be in-the-field adjustments required. Perhaps, we need to install a tent or add more weights to a step-and-repeat banner.

We also use participant feedback or social media listening tools to help shape the campaign as we activate.

CLIENT COMMUNICATION
You will always know what’s happening on your brand activation. We communicate in a variety of ways, such as:

  • Daily recaps, written by the experience manager, detailing the activity of the day
  • Client access to a campaign portal, so you can see quantitative numbers of each day’s activation
  • Check-in calls, as scheduled in advance of the campaign (frequency of check-ins differ)
  • Non-scheduled phone calls or email updates to address any of the in-the-field adjustments we make

Some clients are on-site during the brand activation; we welcome you! Some request us to send set-up photos immediately, and we’re happy to. We like to customize the client communication to your preferences, and we follow that communication plan throughout the entire campaign.

We want to always be in harmony with our clients. Open communication keeps on the same page.

After all, it’s your experience and satisfaction that fuels our success.

EARNED MEDIA RESPONSE
One of the benefits of experiential marketing is its ability to generate earned media. Journalists, influencers and bloggers are drawn to many brand activations. Plus, depending on the campaign, we encourage participants to share their experience socially.

We’re thrilled when we can ignite a creative concept in a way that appeals to media and attracts more positive attention to your brand.

Earned media amplifies your brand activation during the campaign. Engaging with media, responding to posters and tracking impressions is an important piece to your brand activation. We will collaborate with you on how to address media and prepare for the appropriate responses.


To discuss launching your own brand activation, please contact us.