Creating a storm: Two retail trends that demonstrate the real value of Experiential Marketing.

Online shopping has put consumers in the driving seat.  Shoppers now have 24-hour convenience and can do their own research at the tap of a screen.  In fact, Internet shopping increased by 17.8% in 2013¹, suggesting a revolution rather than just an evolution.  Therefore, you’d be led to believe that shopping is increasingly becoming a transactional process, right? Wrong.

A recent survey of the shopping habits of 18- to 25-year-olds suggests that just over two thirds of them - some 68%² - prefer to shop in stores for clothing and shoes.  Furthermore, 53% of shoppers claim that friends are most likely to influence them to buy new clothes, rather than responding to a magazine advert, which is 20%³.  This seems to be the reason why retailers are doing everything they can to create advocates, or brand friends, that will share their good news.  To achieve this, creating the right brand experience is critical to having an emotional connection rather than just a transactional one. 

Simply put, the shopper experience is, and will remain, top of the agenda for a long time.  But how are brands surprising and delighting today’s consumers?  We’ve identified two retail trends to help shed some light..

1. High street retailers creating experiences out of store:

Retailers are looking beyond their own space and taking themselves out to consumers.  By creating experiences in places where consumers would not expect, they are achieving social fuel, which in theory leads to brand advocates.  In February this year, Topshop used their London Fashion Week catwalk at the Tate Modern as the content to drive exciting experiences away from the action.  Consumers were given the chance to experience a live stream of the action at their Oxford Street store shop window. Five lucky winners were plucked out of the crowd and taken south of the river for a front row seat at the show.  Topshop cleverly took the action online too to achieve much wider coverage.  The fashion show was streamed live where consumers could ‘Shoot and Share’ the catwalk looks they loved with their friends online.

Another example is New Look, which has created its own branded double-decker bus which goes on tour across the UK this month to take the stress out of shopping for jeans. New Look wants to delight shoppers by giving them a sleek and fun way to try and buy denim wear. The bus has its own spacious changing facilities, ‘chillax area’ and nail bar, as well as a ‘Selfie Studio’ where people snap and share online for the chance to win £500 worth of vouchers. The mobility of this experience means that it can go to locations at specific times to suit the needs of their target audience, and give them more than just a store experience.

Other exciting out of store retail experiences seem to be popping up everywhere.  Burberry launched a raft of experiential activity during last year’s festive campaign. An iconic delivery van took to the streets of London supported by fashion events and a pop-up experience in Harrods.   Whilst GAP, and this is one I personally experienced, deployed their ‘Cheer Squads’. A group of beautiful, GAP wearing hipsters performing carefully choreographed skits for unsuspecting shoppers in London.   It was quite excellent street theatre that achieved its objective of driving footfall to their stores.

2. Online retailers creating their own physical store experiences:

This emerging trend, labelled "clicks to bricks" or "e-tail to retail", looks set to write yet another chapter in the story of the recent retail revolution. 

With the fact that 68% of consumers prefer to shop in-store for shoes and clothing, it is no wonder that online retailers are searching for ways to connect with their audience offline.  And it’s the retailers that are willing to create rich and fun experiences that seem to be winning.

A good example of this is Rapha, the premium cycle wear brand currently being donned by Team Sky.  The business started life in 2004 as an online retailer and they quickly realised that to achieve a genuine connection with their consumers, they needed a real world experience to build their character.  Rapha opened five stores around the world in London, San Francisco, New York, Osaka and Sydney.  The power of these store experiences has led to a meteoric rise for the brand in a relatively established and crowded market place. The brand experience goes way beyond great design and mood lighting.  They tap into a cycling lifestyle and culture by providing a café, pro bike race screening evenings and its very own club where riders can join other enthusiasts on rides to the countryside.  The majority of their sales remain online, but these precision-engineered experiences have been invaluable in developing their brand story.

Bonobos, a US clothing online retailer, is another good example. They seem to have gone one step further by creating pop-up guide stores, a concept that involves shoppers browsing merchandise then ordering online for a home delivery.  As well as providing a unique experience for its audience, it also creates great content for them to use to excite and energise their online community.

Final thought:

The irony seems to be that the digital and Omni channel revolution is in fact making the retail brand experience, whether in-store or out of store, more important than it has ever been. People talk about their experiences and if they have a great one, they’ll ultimately become an advocate, which in today’s retail world seems to be the Holy Grail.

The Network Experiential is an experiential marketing agency specialising in insight, creative, production and staffing.  We are experienced in retail activation (both in-store and out of store) and pop-up solutions. Please do contact us for more information.

By Simon Couch, Director of Experiential, The Network Experiential

Sources:

1. British Retail Consortium-KPMG Retail Sales Monitor for December 2013

2. LIM College Students' Survey “Shopping Trends Among 18-25 Year-Olds” 2012

3. Cotton Incorporated Lifestyle Monitor 2013

Retail: Five step guide to delivering the perfect in-store brand experience

Over the next five years, the retail sector will experience more change than it has in the previous century.  Providing experiential marketing can keep apace with this change, we believe that in-store ambassadors and brand-owned experiences could truly excel.  Read our five step guide to success…

1. Collaborate with retailers  
Using creativity that fits with a retailer’s core values and practical requirements can make you a really valuable partner.  When planning activity, try and establish what the common core values are between your brand and the retailers, and how you can make activity feel exclusive to them.  From a practical point of view, be aware of a retailer’s Omni-channel approach and how you fit within it.  Work out how you can leverage the retailer’s magazine; blogs; website; social media and mobile to drive traffic to your in-store ambassador.  If your brand experience helps the retailer to overcome their business challenges too, they will be prepared to go the extra mile to help you succeed.  

2. Use technology to your advantage
By combining the physical and the digital, brands can undoubtedly increase the power of their in-store experiences. Tablets especially offer brands sleeker ways to engage shoppers. As well as instigating verbal dialogue, tablets can provide guided shopping; video and audio content; the ability to interact with social networks; newsletter sign-up; valuable content such as blogs about the product and a data capture mechanic.  Brands need to start conversations in-store and continue them long into the future.  Furthermore, retailers are beginning to adopt mobile payment techniques.  If brands can integrate with these systems, they will ultimately control the entire sales process, which is quite a powerful thought.  From a retailer perspective, freeing up their tills and driving maximum sales will always be a big win.

3. Deliver a brilliant experience  
Brands need to capture the shopper’s imagination in an instant.  There is no blueprint for creativity, but we can highlight some critical considerations.  Firstly, ensure that the experience overcomes your target shopper’s barriers, both functional and emotional.  Secondly, be consistent with your out-of-store message and content; let the shopper make the connection as they move along the path to purchase.  Thirdly, develop an experience that can live in-store, both with and without your ambassador, ideally something that can be operated by the shop staff themselves.  Finally and most importantly, use the best and brightest staff to represent your brand in-store.  Make sure you recruit and fully train ambassadors that will appeal to your target shopper as well as integrate with the retailer’s team. 

4. Engage store staff
Make every attempt to take the store staff on your brand journey; by doing this you will create advocates and sustain the power of your brand experience after you have gone.  Training is invaluable, so create and disseminate digital material that is portable and easily accessible.  Bring to life your brand training outside of retail hours to reduce distraction, and remember to make it memorable and inspiring.  Once trained, incentivise your colleagues to deliver your brand messages and drive sales.  Mystery shopping support and sales data are great ways to monitor store staff performance, and reward accordingly.  And finally, from a courtesy point of view, brand ambassadors should integrate and socialise with their surrogate team members; an ‘us and them’ attitude can be negative for all.  

5. Evaluate and optimise
Set your evaluation objectives at the very outset.  Use these objectives to define your operational approach, such as the number of stores and ambassador shifts.  Once the activity is live, the most straightforward measure is sales data. Be sure to request the retailer’s Epos data, with a control set, in the activity negotiation stages. As well as instant sales, remember to keep track of secondary sales, both in-store (when you are not there) as well as online, with promotional codes.  In terms of ongoing reporting, ambassadors are unique in the sense that clients should be offered real-time performance data.  Be sure to work with your agency to analyse this data and make changes to the activity, if necessary, on a daily basis.

The Network Experiential offers a full retailer brand experience service.  This includes planning, creative, staffing, implementation and evaluation.  Please get in touch for more details.

Xbox One vs. PS4: Who won the Experiential Marketing battle?

Within the space of a week, back in November, the two heavy weights of the gaming console world launched in London and across the world.  The showcasing of genuine gaming innovation was always going to be a spectacle, and this did not let us down. With ambitious ‘live’ plans and seemingly sizeable budgets to match, it was great to sit on the sidelines and watch the action unfold.  
But, from an experiential point of view, who came out on top?  Firstly let’s look at what they did.

Xbox One:
The Xbox One Square, a takeover of London’s Leicester Square on the launch evening was no mean feat.  The fact that this was the first ever concert in ‘the Square’ was a real statement of intent.  A sculpted stage and light show gave the spotlight to celebrity talent in the form of Plan B doing a live gig and Andros Townsend taking to the controls on the big screen.  Partygoers were entertained throughout by well executed street theatre and even an appearance from the Stig, arriving in a McLaren Supercar.
Cracking entertainment it was, but the thought went further.  The event was tied in with a pop-up store in The Trocadero, to ensure the glitz was tied in with the important bit, the Xbox One going on sale at midnight that evening.  This was mirrored in 500 stores throughout the UK with live streaming of the concert to those retailers.  Not content with just the UK, the launch stretched to New York and LA.  Predictably such an event attracted national press interest, with coverage in The Telegraph, Mail and Express. 

PS4:
One week later and the PS4 launch was in full swing.  Their ‘London first’ was to adapt the iconic lights of the OXO Tower chimney to the recognisable ‘triangle, circle, cross, square’.  This was a real gold star production and provided great teaser material in the two weeks leading up to the launch date.
As well as lighting up the skyline, PS4 also produced a pop-up store on Bedfont Street in Covent Garden.  Again, this was set up before the launch date to provide core gamers, celebrities and press the chance to get involved and try out the new goods.  It also provided the focus for PlayStation First Development, an academic development programme for young and future game developers. Nice thought!
And then launch night, a VIP party at the OXO Tower attended by a host of celebrities with live music from the Rizzle Kicks and McBusted.  All coordinated with Apartment 4 in Paris, France’s equivalent.

Verdict:
The reality is that without access to the campaign objectives and results, we cannot scientifically judge the outcome.  However, we can give our opinion. We think that both sets of live activity were of a very high quality and undoubtedly caught the attention of core and casual gamers, and even beyond.
But, what caught our eye was Xbox One’s approach to retailer coordination and ensuring they took the message out of London and included their partners across the country.  At the end of the day, this is an NPD and ensuring the end retailers were engaged and empowered really set this activity apart.  We also like this because this level of coordination is not a budget driven achievement, just smart thinking at both ends of the communications spectrum.

That said, well done to both.  We look forward to the next bout in a few years time.

5 Reasons why Experiential Marketing will be the most powerful medium for the Travel Industry in 2014

The changing role of travel agents and the rise of online booking in recent years has left consumers with a complex and time consuming travel booking process.  This is why experiential marketing is gathering momentum in the travel sector, and for very good reason.  Here are five tips to explain why…

1. The Travel Experience  

Most people have their most profound experiences through the sights, sounds, smells, touches and taste that travel provides.  Experiential marketing has the power to create inspirational experiences that touch all these senses.  Compared to other forms of media, experiential marketing has the advantage of being able to challenge the perceptions and change the behaviour of people by evoking the most deep-seated nostalgia or enlightenment within consumers.  Companies are beginning to recognise the power of experiential too. Kuoni’s ‘Scents of Adventure’ is a recent example whereby they introduced an interactive campaign to awaken the senses of unsuspecting Bluewater shopping centre visitors.

2. Simplifying a Complex Decision

The choice and decision involved in booking travel of any kind has become an incredibly complex process which can often involve a great investment of time.  For example, Expedia Media Solutions’ research found that the average packaged-travel purchase takes place after 38 visits to various websites.  This complex decision-making process can be simplified with experiential activity providing relevant, concise and personalised information to the consumer.  By using one-to-one dialogue through trained brand ambassadors, travellers can appreciate the human touch coming back into the booking process.  Online research will continue to play a role in the decision-making process, so it is important that consumers are still provided with this option where they can read reviews and trusted blogs but then be provided with someone on hand to answer questions that need answering and removing their fears.

3. Right People, Right Place

Experiential marketing has the versatility to go where target consumers will be, at a time when they are open to experiencing a product.  An understanding of the target audience is crucial when planning experiential activity.  Insight into the consumer’s mindset, pre-conceptions and barriers to purchase, mean brands can identify the best live environments where an experience will have the biggest impact. A good example of this is the Royal Caribbean Cruises’ experiences, recognising the need to target the family unit together. Their consumer insight suggested that the purchase decision was a democratic family one.  Therefore, their decision to visit family orientated theme parks and shopping centres at weekends was well informed.    

4. Offline to Online

The evolving role of online has created a significant and lasting effect on the travel sector.  This only enhances the power of experiential marketing in that consumer relationships created can now be continued through online dialogue.  This ongoing dialogue can take two forms.  Firstly, the capture of consumer data gives brands the opportunity to re-contact consumers with practical, and exciting, information following the experience.  Secondly, audiences that experience their passions in an experiential setting are being encouraged to share their content on one of the many social media platforms that now exist, amplifying the brand message. The British Airways Great Gatwick Ticket Giveaway offered consumers the chance to win flights by taking a flight simulation challenge at London stations, an experience they could then share with their friends and family online.

5. Creating Genuine Value

Experiential marketing is a proven method of driving brand value, an achievement made by changing perceptions and converting consumers to purchase.  Brands can realise this value by taking a few simple steps.  Firstly, a brand needs to set evaluation objectives prior to the campaign, for example, by collecting consumer details, there is an opportunity to re-contact them and track their behavioural change.  Secondly, by integrating experiential activity with the wider marketing plan, brands can make sure every medium is playing its role in taking consumers along the path to purchase.  And finally, by rigorously evaluating all areas of experiential activity, both live interactions as well as the online impact. A great case in point is The Austrian Winter Flurry, an experiential stunt in Spitalfields Market in London in October 2013.  So entertaining was the content that it quickly became an online hit.  It received over 100k views on You Tube within four days of being uploaded. 

As we slowly move out of economic uncertainty, and consumer habits and spend on travel slowly change, we believe experiential marketing can provide the point of difference for travel brands and services to stand out, literally, and succeed.

Boris’s ‘Brand Park’ is testament to how far Experiential Marketing has come

Experiential marketing, brand experience, brand behaviour, live engagement, three-dimensional marketing.…whatever you choose to call our discipline, I can’t help but feel how far it’s come with the news that the LDA have given the green light to develop a 50-acre ‘Brand Park’ in Silvertown Quays, East London in 2016.

I’m proudly going to show my age here.  I have been working in the experiential sector for just over 15 years.  In that time there have been a number of game changing trends that have affected the way marketers have used our discipline, and it pleases me to say that this is still evolving as I write this blog. I’ll approach this chronologically.

Media fragmentation:

Let’s take a step back to the millennium when brand experience was used as a tactical exercise to support a wider communications campaign.  ATL first, activation second.  It usually consisted of a sampling or roadshow exercise for a food or drink NPD.  OK, a slight generalisation, but you get the picture.  It was only when the saturation and fragmentation of conventional media took a proper grip in the mid ‘Noughties’ that marketers began to see the real value in appealing to all the consumer senses. 

And it wasn’t just the traditional users either; the act of ‘bringing brands to life’ started to appeal to multiple sectors.  Broadcasters; consumer electronics; automotive and even online brands benefitted from creating one to one dialogue in a brand controlled environment.  The increasing size and sophistication of brand experiences enabled them to sit comfortably at the heart of a communications strategy. 

Experiential agencies too saw our profile rise and we were increasingly being invited to marketing’s top table, despite the scepticism about the measurability of our work.

Emergence of digital:

And then digital enlightenment began to take hold.  Social media; e-commerce and gaming all contribute(d) to a significant shift in the traditional media model. The emphasis on earned rather than bought media led to brands craving advocacy from an increasing online community.  And I guess this is where experiential has benefitted more than other media.  Simply put, creating real world experiences creates advocates (and content) that migrate onto digital channels. 

Of course, in the consumer’s world, there is no real world and digital world, just one world.  That is the way that experiential now has to think and act.  The truth is that the landscape remains ever changing; creative technology and innovation is continuously keeping us on our toes.

Great campaigns now require the fusion of these two disciplines but when it is done seamlessly with one great idea, the results have proved more than worthwhile.  This union has continued to throw up some added advantage too.  Consumer tracking post their experience and their subsequent habits online are now helping us to find answers to that evaluation question.

Brands as retailers:

So where are things currently unfolding? We are beginning to see brands reclaiming the retail space; this is not so much a new phenomenon as one that is slowly gathering pace.  Brands have indeed been doing it for a while, just look at Apple, Nike and Sony.  However, it is only now that the power of the retailer is becoming so marginalised by the Internet that brands are looking to wrestle back control. 

The recent pop-up shop craze is testament to this trend.  Brands outside the ‘top 20’ are constructing their own retail experiences, then using the buzz it generates to reach its target audience.

This is what leads us onto the rationale behind East London’s Brand Park.  Brands are beginning to seek flexible, large-scale and accessible spaces to develop high value brand experiences for their audiences. The Brand Park will also allow global brands to influence the online spending decisions of customers, which will be worth up to a total value of £221bn by 2016, and ever increasing.

The brand experience will be central to global communication campaigns and content generation. Experiencing a brand’s innovation could become the hottest ticket in town.

Final thought:

It would seem that we’ve come a long way in a short period of time.  Everything seems to have shifted in one way or another.  However, I do take great comfort from the truth that one common thread still exists in the shifting sands - the human interaction and its ability to capture the imagination; to inspire and change behaviour. 

Author: Simon Couch, Director of Experiential, The Network 

‘brand park’ in Silvertown Quays - http://www.london.gov.uk/priorities/housing-land/land-assets/silvertown-quays