The best fans in baseball have latched onto a furry friend, the rally squirrel, to push the St. Louis Cardinals further into postseason play.  The rally squirrel made his debut during several of the Division Series games in St. Louis and reportedly took a road trip to Philly for Game 5.  Redbird fans have taken him “under their wing” as a good luck charm.

Buschie, as some have dubbed him, has become the most popular personality in St. Louis in just over a week.  There are currently over 50 pages on Facebook dedicated to the little guy, and he has his own Twitter feed.  Untold numbers of t-shirt designs, hats, stuffed animals, and more have been created for fans who want to show their team support by showcasing Buschie and his bushy tail.

Hundreds of news stories have been written, making Buschie even more famous.   Busch Stadium will be giving out rally towels at Game 3 of the NLCS to over 40,000 fans.  I’m sure you’ll hear the catchy Rally Squirrel song playing at the pep rally in Ballpark Village this week as well.  Whether Buschie is the Cardinals’ good luck charm, a fantastic marketing opportunity for local t-shirt manufacturers, or a social media phenomenon – he’s cute and cuddly, and St. Louis has fallen in love with him!  Go Cardinals!

We at Javelin firmly believe that authenticity is key to a successful brand. The skateboarding industry is covered head-to-toe in the bruises and broken bones of authenticity. Birthed out of rebellion and innovation, skateboarding’s forefathers set the tone for originality and the pursuit of progression, which still holds true today. If a brand is really going to be a skate brand, they must fully embody these ideals. For skateboarders like myself, “game recognizes game”- we can smell a fake like a week-old pair of underwear.

Nike and Converse are two brands that have done a great job entering an industry that doesn’t take too kindly to mainstream outsiders. In the past few years, both brands have approached the marketing of their skate shoes through the adventurousness of skateboarding. To quote skateboarding legend Steve Cabellero, “…it’s about the journey, not the destination.” Each brand has exemplified this in video form quite literally – but quite differently.

First up: Nike. Much like the brand’s basketball or golf pros, the skate pros who ride for the Nike team are synonymous with the brand. In the video “Straight Trippin’” Nike pros Chet Childress and Al Partanen embark on a journey from Portland to L.A to New York with nothing but their boards and backpacks. With only a few close-up product shots of the skaters ridin’ and rippin’, the content focuses predominantly on the gnar-tastic adventure  – with Nike’s presence subtly in the background. The brand lives vicariously through the situations at hand and the personalities of the pros.

Next up: Converse.  The brand has a much more commercial, yet equally effective presence in their video “Converse: LA to Vegas”.  Featuring pro Kenny Anderson and a growing mass of skateboarders that follow along, the narrative is a third-person perspective of the journey that showcases the new shoe and what it can do.  Throughout the journey Kenny Anderson performs a nose-manual (skate term for a nose-wheelie) which effectively communicates two things: “Hey look, our KA-ONE shoe is comfortable and durable enough to go on a trip from LA to Vegas on foot!” and “Hey look, our KA-ONE shoe will give you ridiculous skill and balance like pro Kenny Anderson!” the brand not only lives through the situation, but persuades the viewer of its relevance by adding to it.

These are great videos and great examples of how any brand – not just a skate brand – can curate their own authenticity to achieve relevancy and credibility with their target demo.

Augmented Reality is Surreal…
Literally, Augmented Reality (AR) superimposes a fantastic world—with its own set of rules and dreamlike imagery—onto the standard reality we all know and love. This allows us to play the role of Voodoo Witch Doctor, we guide those without our powers into an unseen universe hidden just below the surface. Best of all, we don’t need any magic herbs, sacred mushrooms, or dried lizard tongues.

With no more than a camera and a computer, we can start to expose the worlds that live behind everyday objects. And, these exposed worlds don’t involve a creepy spirit realm filled with ghosts (unless we really want them to). Augmented Reality shows its users information that can be played with on each user’s own terms. This blurs the lines between reality and whatever world we want to bring people to. Talk about Voodoo.

Play With Information on Your Own Terms
We’re living in an information age, where we can find answers to most questions almost instantly. If someone wants to know about your business, your product, they can find reviews on their cell phones while standing in the marketplace. Best Buy embraces this idea, printing QR codes on shelving labels to help guide people to their website (which has reviews and ordering information). Lego has taken how we play with information a step further.

Lego lets you play with its models without potential buyers opening a box, brand ambassadors constructing demonstration sets, or (in some cases) without anyone leaving the comfort of their home. So, how does Lego give a pseudo-hands-on experience, marketing their toys? Augmented Reality—computers augmenting images from a camera and displaying them back to the user. Literally, this puts the ability to play with Lego’s products in your hands without putting anything in your hands.

Watch it in action!

Seriously, did you watch the video?

Experiential Marketing in the Home?
It goes beyond their amazing, in-store kiosk. Lego grants us this hands-on experience without us needing to leave our homes. Their website now supports AR technology, granting web surfers the same ability to play with legos at their computers. I don’t mean any offense, but TV commercials simply can’t do what AR is offering. Why aren’t more brands giving consumers the ability to experience—no, to play with— their products on the consumer’s own terms?

Every once in a while something comes along in marketing or advertising that just wows us with the attention to detail, authenticity, and execution.  This sharable holiday greeting from Grolsch is one of those.

The brand’s website states “conductor Thomas Blunt, seven percussionists, woodwind players and a timpanist create a beautiful rendition of the song using sounds dreamed up through each element of the legendary bottle – glass, air, beer and the uniquely ‘Grolsch’ Swingtop.

Well done, our Dutch friends, well done.

Over the last 6 to 10 years, experiential marketing has been a big buzzword. The general thinking was that creating exciting live experiences between brands and consumers drives results. Experiential programs were broadly focused without much of a focal point on measurement, amplification, or building long-term relationships with consumers.

Over the last few years as the economy tanked, marketers found themselves in a new world where they needed to justify their expenditures – especially when it came to experiential engagement. Programs had to pay for themselves or they simply wouldn’t get approval from upper management. Rather quickly the new buzzwords became digital and social media, word of mouth, metrics and KMI’s. Data capture became incredibly attractive . Who was actually attending those live experiences that cost so much to create? Some circles turned to virtual events to offset huge fabrication costs and create just-as-compelling experiences in a digital environment, thinking “Why not? More people can be engaged at a lower overall cost.”

Our industry, like all others, is ever-evolving. New priorities (and thus buzzwords) have entered our lexicon, and will continue to do so as the economy, marketplace, and our industry move forward. Transactional experiences. Narrow-casting. Ownable content. Always-on experiences that facilitate seamless engagements between brands and consumers through online and offline modes of communication. Marketing campaigns without a definable beginning and end. These are the new realities of our today and tomorrow.

Today consumers skip nimbly from medium to medium – from a live conversation to a Google search to a Facebook post to a mobile app to retail, back to mobile to perhaps browse through an online catalog for the store they’re standing in, accessing an augmented reality app through their device where they can actually visualize themselves trying on various outfits from that very store, then pressing a button to purchase the items online at a discount. Some even have an automatic update about the purchase post to Facebook, visible to their friends.

This is the world we live in. As an experiential marketing agency, we understand how savvy brands need to approach consumer engagement in this complicated environment. It’s no longer about who can create the best experience, who can best leverage social media or digital, or who has the coolest mobile app. Tactical execution is critical, but strategy trumps all.

We are Javelin.

If you ask 5 different people to define experiential marketing, you’ll probably end up with 5 different answers (moreover, if you’re talking to the right people, all 5 answers will probably be on-target in one way or another).  Here’s a great piece by Erik Hauser from 2007 that comments on the “fluidity” of experiential marketing:

The definition of experiential marketing is fluid – as is the methodology itself. It was once little talked about, and is now being embraced as a silver bullet. I once posed the simple question of experiential marketing’s definition to the Experiential Marketing Forum (experientialforum.com), and received more than 200 definitions from more than 150 countries.

Given the wide range of views on what experiential marketing encompasses, it follows that literature on the subject abounds. Since many of these books rival college textbook prices, we thought we’d start a reading list challenge to lay down the definitive word on which titles are worth your time and money, and which ones are not.

We haven’t had time to read all of these experiential marketing books, so we turned to user reviews on Amazon.com and BarnesAndNoble.com to help sort through the mayhem.  We’ll ignore the reviews that read like the publisher wrote them for the back cover of the book, and focus on the brave souls who threw down their hard earned cash to discover if a book was a sleeper or a gem of marketing wisdom. The verdict will be a thumbs up, thumbs down, or when we can’t tell yet, thumbs sideways.

If you’ve read any of these books and have thoughts to share, please add your comments! If you add something particularly insightful, we’ll update the post with your thoughts and provide a link back to your site. Are you ready?

1. Experiential Marketing: How to Get Customers to Sense, Feel, Think, Act, Relate (1999),by Bernd Schmitt

The consensus on this book is that it treats old news (moving beyond features and benefits, marketing to consumer emotions, etc…) like it’s a revolution. Probably nothing you don’t already know.

2. Experiential Marketing: A Practical Guide to Interactive Brand Experiences (2009) by Shaz Smilansky

One 5-star positive review does not inspire supreme confidence but there’s no reason to believe there isn’t something worthwhile here. Jury’s out.

3. Experience the Message: How Experiential Marketing Is Changing the Brand World (2006) by Max Lenderman

Generally favorable reviews with a few thoughtful critiques. Lenderman hits the right notes with his analysis of the experience economy.

4. The Experience Economy: Work Is Theater & Every Business a Stage (1999) by B. Joseph Pine

This one seems to have withstood the test of time. However, it reads like a textbook (because it is one).

5. Customer Experience Management: A Revolutionary Approach to Connecting with Your Customers (2003) by Bernd H. Schmitt

Schmitt’s follow up to the 1999 release mentioned above received more positive feedback, but he still got knocked for his somewhat academic approach.

6. Managing the Customer Experience: Turning Customers Into Advocates (2002) by Shaun Smith

Positive reviews abound, but it sounds like a new edition is needed to take into account changes in mobile connectivity and the social web.

7. Critical Thinking in Consumer Behavior: Cases and Experiential Exercises (2009) by Judy Graham

No reviews to go on here. Have you read it?

8. Let Them Eat Cake: Marketing Luxury to the Masses – As well as the Classes (2005) by Pamela N. Danziger

According to one reviewer, the book lacks the why and how of marketing to the masses versus particular classes. Another reviewer thought it sounded an awful lot like this book, Trading Up: Why Consumers Want New Luxury Goods and How Companies Create Them by Michael J. Silverstein.

9. Ageless Marketing: Strategies for Reaching the Hearts and Minds of the New Customer Majority (2003) by David B. Wolfe

Loads of favorable reviews.  However, I’m curious what Wolfe would have to say on marketing to the new customer majority in today’s economic climate.

10. There’s No Business That’s Not Show Business: Marketing in an Experience Culture (2003) by Bernd H. Schmitt, David L. Rogers, and Karen Vrotsos

Seems to be targeting those interested in learning about what it’s like to work with major brands and (relatively) large budgets, not those who already work with well-known brands.

11. Events Design and Experience (Events Management) (2007) by Graham Berridg

A different look at events than what you might find in the other books listed here. The focus is on design elements.

12. Brandscapes: Architecture in the Experience Economy (2007) by Anna Klingmann

Another look at design in the experience economy. This one scales it up to the architecture of buildings and environments. Kudos to Klingmann for the portmanteau title too!

13. Place Branding: Glocal, Virtual and Physical Identities, Constructed, Imagined and Experienced (2009) by Robert Govers, et al.

While not directly applicable to experiential marketing, there are lessons here for any brand manager.

14. Trillion-Dollars Moms : Marketing to a New Generation of Mothers (2005) by Maria Bailey, Bonnie Ulman

Like Wolfe’s breakdown of the new customer majority, this title focuses on marketing to a specific demographic. Anonymous reviews don’t cut it though.

15. Brand Enigma : Decoding the Secrets of Your Brand (2009) by Duncan Bruce, David Harvey

A how-to guide for placing your brand at the center of your business… no reviews yet. Have you read it?

16. Life after the 30-Second Spot : Energize Your Brand with a Bold Mix of Alternatives to Traditional Advertising (2005) by Joseph Jaffe

Worth a look. Jaffe makes the case for mixing up your ad budget with new media. Another title where an updated edition might be needed.

17. Greentailing and Other Revolutions in Retail : Hot Ideas That Are Grabbing Customer’s Attention and Raising Profits (2008) by Neil Stern, Willard Ander

Interesting premise. No reviews though. Have you read it?

18. New PR : An Insider’s Guide to Changing the Face of Public Relations (2007) by Phil Hall

Looks at the role of experiential marketing strategies in public relations. No reviews yet. Have you read it?

19. Before the Brand : Creating the Unique DNA of an Enduring Brand Identity (2002) by Alycia Perry, David Wisnom, David Wisnom III

With this title, the emphasis is on brand identity. We’ll need to read it or hear your thoughts on it before we make up our minds though.

My first Event Marketer Summit was a blur of experiential marketing speakers, case studies and seminars, getting lost in the hotel, stealing sombreros, and eating my weight in Mrs. Fields cookies.  I was excited to take it all in until I noticed how out of place I was, standing in the registration line behind a lot of stuffy suits.  Fortunately, it soon became clear the line was for a biotech conference.  As soon as I found the right registration area the crowd around me was casual, lighthearted, and dressed in green ties, purple sneakers, feather skirts, etc.  You know…the usual marketing look.

The days were crammed with engaging speakers, “BeLinking” and conversation.  The highlights for me were HP, BlackBerry, AT&T, Yahoo, Sports Illustrated, Virgin Galactic, and several authors.  Impossible to ignore was the massive amount of branded swag from room drops and vendor exhibits, ranging from cheese to charcoal to notebooks.  It was nice to finally to put some faces with some of the names I’d been chatting with by email – and to check out all the latest technology on display.

The nights were full as well.  On Monday I attended The EX Award Gala, along with other Javelin folks, to represent Bacardi B-LIVE in the Best Nightlife Program category.  Cheering for ourselves and our competitors was equally fun, and we looked damn good doing it!

Donna Meier, Jen Novak, Erin Bagby, Meredith Goette - EX Awards 2010

Tuesday, after dinner with my colleague Meredith and some of her Chicago agency friends, we headed to MasterTent’s Cuatro de Mayo Party for free food, free booze and free sombreros.  Actually, I’m not absolutely sure the sombreros were free – but we took them anyway.

Reconnecting with friends

The best part was dragging our sombreros to all the morning seminars and then through the airport.  Not.  It was worth it, though – we had them for the real Cinco de Mayo.

Ole!

All in all, my first experiential marketing summit was a success.  I met tons of vendors, learned new ideas and ways of approaching projects, and my suitcase weighed about 10 extra pounds with all the swag I brought back!  I’m looking forward to many more in the future.

The human mind is the ultimate experiential consumer.

Where can we find some intellectual street cred and big brain support for our beloved discipline, experiential marketing? It is with keen insights and modern truths we can see and prove that the human mind is the ultimate experiential consumer—that experience drives all perception and opinion forming.

It is with great thanks (and enduring apologies) to Jonah Lehrer that I have done a mash-up of his great work, Proust Was A Neuroscientist, and our beloved discipline, experiential marketing. Briefly:

Proust had already discovered what Lehrer was trying to find out. He knew that 1) smell and taste produce uniquely intense memories, and 2) memory is dependent on the moment and mood of the individual. Scientists didn’t establish these facts until a few years ago, yet Proust made the point in 1913.

Smell and taste are the most intense of remembered sensations.

As we continue to learn more and more about the brain’s complex chemistry, we should – as experiential marketers – help our clients understand the primacy of the impact consumers will experience when they are addressed head-on in a sensory capacity. In fact, this bit says it all:

Proust’s goal in Remembrance of Things Past is to anatomize memory. His literary examinations teach him that smell and taste are the most intense of remembered sensations. Fast forward some 90 years to 2002, when Rachel Herz, a psychologist at Brown, shows that smell and taste are indeed uniquely potent evokers of memory.

This power, she speculates, lies in the direct connection the gustatory and olfactory nerves have to the hippocampus, which Lehrer calls “the center of the brain’s long-term memory.”

Establish the memories, then we can tinker.

Memories are not immutable as Herz and others have found; rather, they change as we remember them. I believe the key in experiential marketing is to first ESTABLISH the memories. We can then tinker with the nuance via social media and ad campaigns, but without base-line experiences to “fiddle with” we cannot gain serious ground in the consumer’s mind.

To me these are enlightenments equal to – if not more powerful than – ROI models. The discoveries of modern neuroscience, combined with the insights of these great thinkers, show that demonstration is king…that stimulating the senses is the coin of the realm in creating real, lasting memories…resulting in converted customers.

Enjoy Proust Was A Neuroscientist if you are so inclined. It’s a nice visit with Woolf, Stein, Escoffier, Stravinsky and of course Proust…our experiential forefathers.

Like you, I do my marketing homework.  I keep up with industry pubs, must-attend seminars, über-hip “expert” ad execs, cool school, Gladwell, Bob Garfield, Bob’s blog, your blog, etc.  The plethora of expert supposition/opinion/fact is enlightening, it really is, but who can keep up with it all?  In an effort to simplify our lives as experiential marketers, brand stewards and idea-generators, I’d like to propose an experiment of sorts.

I contend that everything we need to know about marketing, branding, and getting to great ideas has already been surmised by two people born over a century apart but united by their mutual distaste for monotony, monogamy and prison. Oscar Wilde and Paris Hilton have done a damned good job of generating axioms about life that are applicable to marketing – and easier to digest than the next must-read Fast Company book-of-the-month.

So here’s what I propose: skip reading What The Dog Saw and Baked.  It’s okay, people.  Really.  Let’s take a short break – a Nestea plunge if you will – from all the marketing intelligence surrounding us.  It will all be waiting for us tomorrow.

Today let’s run our marketing efforts through the WildeParis Experiment.  Sound kinky?  Here’s how it works:  simply see if the idea you are thinking about pitching or buying fulfills upon all or most of the following list of quotes – marketing axioms, as I like to call them.

The following lines are quotes from Oscar Wilde and Paris Hilton. Have fun guessing who said what (click on the quote to see who said it), but that’s not the point of the experiment.  The point is to take a break from the plethora of expert supposition/opinion/fact, and simplify what you need to know to deem an idea great.  Here we go.

“There is no sin worse in life than being boring.”

Go ahead; be honest with yourself when assessing your work.  Do you like the idea? Love the idea?  Are you passionate about it? You know if it’s boring. If you don’t…you’re boring.

“I can resist everything except temptation.”

That’s what we do for a living; we tempt.  Is your idea irresistible?  Is your story tempting?

“There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.”

Look, there’s a lot of money being wasted on marketing shit nobody cares about, notices or talks about. There are many, many examples, and I don’t want to be cruel, but consider this.  Almost every brand seems to believe they need a website, right?  And I agree, most brands do. But have you ever visited the black, depressing, corporate, empty, pointless hole that is macys.com, walmart.com, century21.com, aa.com? AA.com is American Airlines, not Alcoholics Anonymous; their site, aa.org, is pretty good.  Anyway, the list of grotesquely expensive, meaningless, never-talked-about marketing goes on and on.  And it is the worst thing in the world.

“There’s nobody in the world like me. I think every decade has an iconic blonde – like Marilyn Monroe or Princess Diana – and right now, I’m that icon.”

Homogeneity abounds.  Brands and marketers alike are too often risk-averse, and without risk — intelligent risk — there is no innovation.  I give out Failure Awards at the agency to recognize those who embrace risk to achieve something great, truly creative and original.  Without risk, your brand is just another pair of khaki pants in a button down shirt, hiding behind a laminated desk, waiting for the clock to strike 5 so it can rush home in its minivan to a plastic house in the suburbs.  But if your brand is consistently taking inspired risks and sometimes failing, you become something original or, on rare occasions, iconic.

“When people agree with me, I always feel that I must be wrong.”

Embrace a culture of friction and passionate discourse.  Never hire your doppelganger. Fire every “yes” man in your organization.  If you don’t, you’ll never have a great idea.

“I don’t have sex unless I’m in a relationship. I’m old-fashioned when it comes to that. I really am!”

Consumers want to have relationships with real, committed brands like Mountain Dew, not blowup dolls like (insert your favorite poseur brand).  Know what your brand is.  Know what it isn’t. Commit to it.  Not everyone needs to like your brand, and your brand doesn’t need to sleep with everyone; we’re not in high school.

To get a consumer into bed you need to know them.  Know who they really are.  Love them.  Eat fast food with them.  Play Halo with them.  Ride scooters, walk dogs, go shopping at Wal-Mart (yes you, go to Wal-Mart), watch obscure movies, eat fish heads, wear latex body suits…do whatever your demo does.  Here’s why: if you commit to what you are, you’ll never be a part of another lifeless brand and you’ll never garner lifeless results.  You’ll be in the hottest, sexiest relationship of your life.

“Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.”

To support this point, I’ll break with consistency in the WildeParis Experiment, and take a look at what Seth Godin, the maestro of expert supposition/opinion/fact, has to say about consistency.  Or is it inconsistency?

Consistency
How can someone:
… be opposed to euthanasia but in favor of the death penalty?
… be in favor of the impeachment of Bill Clinton but not of George Bush?
… be worried about global warming but fly in a big private plane?
… be in favor of the impeachment of George Bush but not of Bill Clinton?
… be opposed to amnesty for illegal aliens but in favor of a pardon for Scooter Libby?
… be in favor of military intervention in Darfur but not in Iraq?
… be opposed to big government but want the government to control public speech?
… be in favor of banning medical marijuana but opposed to government regulation of cigarettes?
… be opposed to judicial meddling except in cases where you disagree with the current laws?

Easy. Because people aren’t consistent. Sure, you say, each of the above examples isn’t fair. They don’t match. They don’t line up. [Smart people are lucky: they can hold seemingly contradictory ideas in their head while they look more deeply into the facts and make good decisions... it’s called nuance.]

We don’t eat dessert because we’re on a diet but we put blue cheese dressing on our salad. We don’t pay extra for first class but we refuse to give up a seat to get bumped from a flight, even though the reward is a thousand dollars. We curse the spam that clutters our e-mail boxes but turn around and authorize millions of pieces of junk mail to go out to support our new business.
The local hardware store owner curses the existence of Home Depot but buys his family’s clothes at Wal-Mart. The vegetarian wears a leather belt…

Everything is a special situation; everything begs for inconsistency. If all we did was market to computers, life would be a lot simpler, but a lot less interesting.

So, there it is: the WildeParis Experiment.  It may not be perfect but it’s certainly a reprieve from all the expert supposition, opinion and fact.  Give it a try and let me know how it turns out!

Experiential Marketing Delivers Engaged Consumers

Experiential marketing employs an arsenal of effective tactics ranging from nightlife marketing to campus activations, custom vehicle marketing to guerilla street teams, mall tours to word of mouth programs, and luxury marketing to publicity stunts.  Regardless of the tactic selected, there is one deliverable both client and agency agree is crucial — the engaged customer.

Without discounting the importance of acquiring new customers or re-engaging past customers (both essential), we believe experiential marketing can deliver results in the most sustained fashion by way of the long tail.   Be it the digital long tail of sustained content that feeds search, or the long tail of sales – all can be positively affected by events, experiences, and brand engagements that generate trial, consideration, adoration and conversation.

The Long Tail (image by Anup Shah)

Experiential Marketing Delivers Long Term ROI

The Advertising Research Foundation states in a recent study on experiential marketing that brand experiences “improve profitability by increasing both short-term sales and long-run brand demand… The tendency is to think they only have short-term impacts. On the contrary, the power of experiential marketing is shown in this study to go beyond short-term effects to generate a longer-term brand value.”

There isn’t a brand manager or CMO alive that would NOT want to get – and keep – 10-15% of their consumers “wagging.”  The lifetime consumers.  The new consumers interested in base, mainstay products.  The consumers interested in a company’s aggregate smaller product lines; and there’s good reason…Netflix being a great example.

Search engine optimization, word of mouth, and social media in general “wag” the Long Tail online with a constant supply of Flickr pics, blog comments, YouTube videos and comments, tweets and Facebook fan activity.  Brand generated content can get things started, but the real dividend of an experiential investment is consumer generated activity and its impact.

Experiential Marketing Delivers Lasting Relationships

Relationships begin with conversation, and at our shop that’s exactly what we sell.  We are conversant in sight, sound, scent, taste, touch, and the persuasive arts.

The Art of Conversation (image via tendaysontheisland.com)

It is in these conversations that brand advocacy is fostered, adopters become adorers, and new customers are won.  It is in these conversations that the prospects for a tail to grow long are greatly enhanced.  Brands can achieve both short-term and long-term goals with experiential marketing; it is a force multiplier in terms of real ROI…and that’s something to wag about.