Experiential Attracts. DM Connects

01/03/2009

Experiential marketing is about conveying the essence of a brand through a personalised experience. Direct mail, too, is about treating the consumer as an individual. So, using them together as part of an integrated marketing campaign makes perfect sense, argues Ruairi Keogh, Director of Consumer, Slattery Communications

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Experiential is a growing technique for marketers because it helps cement the emotional bond between a brand and its audience by addressing people as individuals. In this respect it has a lot in common with direct mail because DM, too, is about creating a personalised experience. Working together, they can greatly increase the impact of a marketing campaign.

What an experience!

This branch of marketing is all about conveying the essence of a brand in a personalised experience. Instead of targeting many people, experiential marketing is aimed at the individual. The key to its success is that people choose to participate in experiences willingly, having first established the relevance of a brand or product to their needs. And if they have an enjoyable experience, then they are left with good memories of the day and a positive association with the brand that was responsible for the experience.

Mind you, the flipside is that if the experience doesn’t live up to the promise, the consumer may be left feeling quite negative about a brand. So, as with all marketing, delivering on the promise is vitally important.

A key characteristic of experiential marketing – and the reason it works...

...Is that it offers consumers something of value. Putting a big logo behind a band playing on a stage is fine if it’s a new brand trying to get its name out there but otherwise it’s of limited value. People want more from brands, and events such as music festivals allow brands to respond in sometimes quite innovative ways.

For example, at Electric Picnic this year, O2 ran an information service based on Bluetooth so that anyone within range of O2’s broadcast area could receive messages to their mobile telling them which band was on where, giving directions to different stages and so on. An example of a really useful service that reflected well on the brand.

Drinks companies, too, are past masters at using experiential marketing to engage with consumers. The focus here is on more than just the experience of drinking their product. It’s how you’re drinking it: with whom you’re drinking it, what type of atmosphere you’re drinking it in.

And just as some drinks taste better when mixed with others, experiential marketing can work better when integrated with other media.

Mail delivers an element of the experience

Take direct mail. On one level, direct mail can be seen as just another way of making contact with people to involve them in an experience (“Come to our party”). On another, however, the experience actually starts with the mailing; the mailing delivers an element of the experience. It’s actually hard sometimes to see where the DM stops and the ‘experience’ begins. Inevitably so, because a mailed invitation is often the very first effort on the part of a brand to reach out and ‘touch’ the consumer. And a really well crafted invitation is often very effective. And by that I don’t mean it has to be beautiful presented and gold-embossed; the real appeal could be in the writing, the copy.

Create a very personal experience for the consumer

Experiential and direct mail work so well together because they both create a very personal experience for the consumer. I witnessed this first hand when I signed up to a well known beer brand’s online invitation to become an ‘official supporter’ of Euro 2008 (I’m a lifelong Spurs fan so I was genuinely interested in the football – honest!). Soon after, I received a pack in the post, which included a small football, a fixture chart so I could follow matches and write in results, and, of course, vouchers to purchase some beer. I was then encouraged by the brand in question to invite some friends over and host a Euro 2008 viewing party in my house. It was very cleverly done in that instead of creating events for people to go to, they were helping people to host their own parties and further broadening the experiential effect.

Experiential and direct mail combine equally well in other areas too.

Take cars for example. How many people will go out and buy a car without test-driving it; without experiencing it? A couple of years ago, we worked with Toyota to develop an experiential-plus direct mail campaign for Toyota’s hybrid model, The Prius.

We wanted to get across the ‘cleaner, greener’ message to a group of 120 key opinion leaders including motoring journalists so we sent them out a cannister of oxygen together with a personalised invitation to test-drive the car.

This caught their attention in a way that a press release could never have. The personalised contact was vital and the direct mail was a really important facilitator of it. It was then time for the real experience: the test-drive.

When the car was dropped off, a Prius specialist was on hand to explain how the car worked, when the electric engine would kick and so on. This ensured that the interest that had been aroused via the DM piece was full satisfied during the experiential part – the test-drive.

How it worked for Tourism Australia

Direct mail was also an important part of the mix when Tourism Australia did some marketing around the International Rules Football series Down Under recently. We identified a group of Irish journalists who were going to head down to Australia to cover the series. Then we used direct mail to send them a travel pack that would help them get the most out of their time there, including reading material for the long journey, sun screen, an electrical adapter, some background about the places where they would be staying and information on the games themselves.

The upshot was that several journalists wrote pieces that went well beyond match reports, focusing on their experiences of Australia itself – the trips they took to the Red Centre and the Hunter Valley vineyards so on. Exactly what the client wanted. We’d also organised special trips such as hot-air balloon flights, which several journalists wrote about. Again, great for the client.

Would they have written about this stuff anyway? Possibly, but the travel pack they’d received beforehand prompted this type of coverage by suggesting places to visit and providing useful information. What’s more difficult to measure is the ‘talkability’ factor – the interest they generated by telling people about their experiences – but there’s no doubt there was plenty of that, too.

Emergence of more 'clubs'

I can see more campaigns happening that combine the two media – experiential and DM. In particular, I expect to see the emergence of more ‘clubs’ that bring people together with a common interest – such as football, music or travel – and direct mail will play a very important part in these.

To my mind, there’s no question but that experiential and DM work together. And work together extremely well. But don’t take my word for it; go out and experience the connection for yourself.

Ruairi Keogh is Director of Consumer, Slattery Communications

This article is part of a series commissioned by An Post in partnership with Marketing Magazine