The Hindu Business Line : Experience’s emerging!

At a recent tier 1 auto show in the US, Honda decided to do something different. It wanted to challenge customers into an activity that would not only tickle their sense of design but also engage them with the brand. The auto major thought it wouldlet the consumers come up with their own Honda model!

To bring alive this idea, Honda roped in George P. Johnson, a US-based marketing agency specialising in ‘experience marketing’.

This is how consumers participated in Honda’s marketing exercise at the auto shows held in New York, Detroit, Chicago and Los Angeles: George P. Jonhson helped Honda create a touch-screen kiosk that let customers customise any Honda model using different hardware and cosmetic options such as colour of paint, stripes and other designs. After customers picked these basic details, a virtual 3-D model helped them see how the car actually looked. They could even spin the car around, virtually, of course! Once the consumer was satisfied with what she had created, she could press a button and the kiosk would print out a card stock version which, when folded along the perforated lines, became a 3-D model.

Says David Rich, Senior Vice-President (Strategic Marketing - Worldwide) of George P. Johnson: “We saw people walking all day holding a 3-D model of a Honda Civic or whatever it was. Clearly, this resonated with them. It’s just a piece of paper but they are keeping it because they have put their personality into it. They have already engaged with the brand. Experience marketing is about driving brand engagement, persuasion, and deep brand affiliation.”

David Rich, Senior Vice-President (Strategic Marketing - Worldwide) of George P. Johnson, explains. “Ten years ago, marketing was about brands telling consumers: ‘You can have this product the way we created it for you, created in a way that it’s just about our brand.’ Today, it’s all about co-authored marketing and product development. Marketing is no longer a one-to-one, unidirectional activity. It’s all about interaction, engagement and participation. The marketplace today is gravitating towards co-authorship of marketing with the consumer too participating in the marketing exercise.”

With people getting sceptical about marketing claims, they want to “look the brand in the eye and decide for themselves if it’s good for them or not. “And you can do this through live experiences more than you can do with another medium.”

“Experience helps consumers make a decision as to whether the brand is right for them, whether it is authentic, whether they believe in it and whether the brand values are important to them. Do they feel comfortable with the brand values? Do they see their life improving some way – emotionally, psychologically, physically, by going deeper with the brand? Experience marketing helps the audience internalise brand values and drives affiliation deep. It is highly customer-centric.”

But experience marketing is not a new phenomenon. Marketers have resorted to it for ages, but never before has it been given as much priority in the marketing budgets of companies as today.

Experience marketing is a specialised form of marketing under the umbrella of event marketing. While event marketing is primarily a one-way dialogue where consumers get all the info they want, experience marketing goes a step ahead and involves consumers in an omni-directional manner.

Experience marketing and IT

Experience marketing is used a lot in the IT space, which is restricted by constraints of intangibility and invisibility.

Says Rich: “The challenge of IT is that the intention of the offering created is supposed to be invisible – when it’s working well, it’s not supposed to show. In fact, if it shows, it’s usually an indication that it’s not working well. But in order to buy it, you have to be able to experience it. So, we help our clients make what is normally invisible visible. It’s a big challenge but when we do it and it’s done well, it really drives business.”

Rich explains how even a dry subject such as service-oriented architecture (SOA) can be made interesting and engaging with a bit of innovation and out-of-box thinking. “SOA is about harmonising different technologies into one system where the system is optimised. But even for IT people, it’s a complex conversation to have. So the challenge is how do you ‘experientialise’ it and make it simple for people to understand and at the same time create the impression that, say, IBM will be the best SOA provider for you?”

Well, go back to the good old ‘interactive’ kiosk again. Create a metaphor around the subject of SOA. The metaphor is all about the choreography of music, light and rhythm. Consider each of them to be the different technologies in the IT environment, which when coordinated together creates “something beautiful.”

The kiosk takes you through all this: it asks you to choose the rhythm and speed you want – fast, slow or salsa; it also has a colour palette which helps you pick the colours you like. And when you are satisfied, you press a button, and lo and behold a water fountain appears, choreographed to the exact definition you have selected.

“The client gets it. He tells himself: ‘So, this is what IBM’s SOA solution will provide me.’ This is how a difficult to communicate value proposition becomes so easy to experience and define. Otherwise, it’s hard to see SOA,” says Rich.

This project was started in Germany and later installed in the US as well.

Inching forward

In a global study conducted in North America, Western Europe and Asia Pacific by George P. Johnson recently, marketers were asked this hypothetical question: ‘If you were to receive a big increase in marketing spends, to which marketing discipline – broadcast, print, PR, Web, direct, event – will you allocate it?’ Event came first, Web came second.

“Clearly, online is an important channel now. What’s interesting is that broadcast and print came later,” says Rich.

Although India wasn’t part of the study, Rich says the country is also reacting like many other market places. “What we are seeing in the market today is a proliferation of competition, and, therefore, messaging; messaging creates clutter, noise. That’s impossible to shine through. So, companies across India and the world are saying: If I want general awareness, I go to broadcast and print; if I want engagement and persuasion I go to events, experience marketing and online. Broadcast and print will never go away but they will never be as supreme as they have been.”

Large marketing services companies worldwide are saying that five years from now, two-thirds of their income will come from below-the-line activities. Today, it is the opposite with print and broadcast leading the way, says Rich.

About 22-26 per cent of clients’ marketing budget today is towards experience or event marketing. And it is on an upcurve definitely, says Rich stoutly. “My suspicion is that it is closer to the 22 per cent than 26 as it’s an emerging market.”

“I have a 14-year-old son who is the master of the digital video recorder (DVR) and the remote. Which means I haven’t seen a commercial in two years – that’s when I got the DVR. I don’t miss the TV. And I don’t see it because my son has no patience for it. He is the marketplace of the future saying: ‘I don’t want to be marketed to and I don’t want to be interrupted.’ ” This is where experience marketing scores. It is a “non-interruptive model”. It meets people where they are already going rather than saying they have to come over here.

The survey also studied whether event marketing is an afterthought, a lead tactic or it is taken under consideration with all the other disciplines.

“Five-10 years ago, ‘afterthought’ would have come out as number one because event wasn’t seen as a strategic marketing exercise. Now, uniformly around the world, it is being taken under consideration with all the other marketing disciplines, which is the way it should be done in a true marketing planning agnostic approach. Experience’s emerging.”

Internet and experiences

Today, the Internet is complementing experience marketing to “supplant broadcast and print,” says Rich.

For instance, when Research in Motion (RIM) wanted to communicate to audiences in India that the Blackberry is not just for the enterprise user but also for ordinary consumers, George P. Johnson recommended leveraging the power of the online medium.

When the Blackberry Curve was launched in India – it created an ‘experience’ zone (where consumers experienced the brand first-hand) which looked like a curve in malls in Bangalore, Delhi and Mumbai. As the highlight of the Curve is the camera, an online photography competition was held to demonstrate the power of taking a photo on the Blackberry and immediately mailing it to anyone. RIM created a Web site with a ‘Blackberry Face of India’ contest. Photographs were mailed from the experience zone to the Web site. Every month, ten Blackberry handsets were given away free to the person whose photos were featured on the site.

What makes experience marketing work well is that it’s interactive. “But how do I extend the experience and make it live longer than just the moment?” asks Rich. “Online is the ideal solution. Print and broadcast don’t help make that happen. Direct marketing doesn’t. If I want to drive you to the event, I can reach you online through the e-mail. And when you are at the event, I can find out more information about what’s important to you … I can register that on my online systems. And that can customise the online follow-up to extend the experience beyond the physical portion of the event. We can build a community between meeting face-to-face and meeting online. One feeds the other. Commonality and mutuality of the two working together is really the secret of marketing going further.”

And the next emerging sector that will see the use of experience marketing a lot in the days to come is the pharmaceutical industry, says Rich.

“It’s all traditional activity in pharma at the moment. If brands go generic, companies are in trouble. Nobody believes claims anymore. So companies must get the health care providers and researchers and professionals involved in drug trials to recommend their brands. That’s where experience marketing will come into play …”

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