Breaking Barriers: The Art And Impact Of Experiential Moments

Nowadays, experiential has become sort of an integral part of brands creating an emotional connect with their consumers saying we will be there for you, you are in our thoughts and stuff like that. Experiential marketing is a great way, not just to introduce your product, but also to introduce the aspiration and lifestyle around it. Experiential events help you in driving loyalty, and community, say industry veterans.

Shedding light on experiential marketing playing out on the field, Shradha Agarwal, Co-founder & CEO, Grapes Digital mentioned, “There are the three ways of doing experiential marketing, the way we put it together is the three P's. First is permanent - permanent structures means how you create tourist attractions with it. India is very far in those, but we still have a few of them like Kidzania. It's a perfect example of how a KinderJoy will explain how did we make this chocolate, or Nexa will explain how our cars being created, or how you can experience driving at that centre. The second one is to do with properties, and we were talking about properties that can be created like Lakme Fashion Week, or we create properties like Airtel Delhi Half Marathon. And the third one is pop ups, wherein you do one of those for a particular event, and then you move on to it. But all these three are able to help you in terms of driving a lot of affinity towards the brand, because now you're living the brand.”

She continued, “Now imagine if the number of ads you're exposed to in a day is 6,000 to 10,000, how are you imagining loyalty coming in from the consumers? They forget about you. That's why Facebook and Google are making so much money, because you want to drive recall also with them. And hence, such kind of experiential events help you in driving loyalty, and community. And that's where the epitome of experiential marketing lies.”

Minal Srinivasan, Managing Director, Kesari Infrabuild gave her perspective, rooted a little more in academics than the practical experiences, “When I kept on thinking about what is it that brands can do to forge a stronger emotional brand, my first thing was, why are emotions so important for us? We have inherited our emotional brain from the mammals, which is a very primitive aspect of our brain compared to your rational brain, which is your thinking brain. And, that's precisely the reasons why emotions dominate pretty much every decision. Marketers who are able to leverage this aspect and build that science of emotions as part of their core marketing strategy are the ones who are able to forge the stronger emotional brands and can further build on to it.”

She further went on, “Now brand marketers who understand that and are able to weave those motivators as part of their strategy and then implement that through, an immersive experience, a multi-sensory immersive experience for their buyers are the ones who really succeed. And this is something which is done fantastically by organisations like Apple, Google.”

Ashish Kaul, CMO, Hero Realty was of the view that Indians have been the pioneers of exploiting the emotional quotient when it comes to brand and largely, we know there are only two sort of brands that exist, the brands that we need in our day to day life and the brands that we aspire to own. And that requires a different approach altogether. “I think Indians have done that quite well where we still, I think what I would want to see a change is the service part of it. While we are very good at articulating the emotional connect between the consumer and the brand, we're equally bad, perhaps the worst in the world when it comes to service. When you look at the brand and when you look at the kind of work we are doing phenomenal work, you know, I think 90 per cent of the ad world is captured by Indians in terms of the creativity, in terms of the acceptance by intelligentsia, the kind of awards that we win, the kind of recognition that Indian brains have. But what about the consumer experience in terms of the brand servicing? And which is why people still look at India as an affordable brand destination.”

“Media is the most popular here because it's cheap. Not because it's good, but because it's cheap. Manpower is because it's the cheapest. Production is because it's the cheapest. Labour is because it's cheap. And I think this cheapness, somewhere, it overall, if you were to do a survey and compare the purchase, the brand experience when it comes to purchase and the brand experience that is post-purchase, there will be huge. And in my lifetime, I've seen there is absolutely huge delta between the two”, emphasised Kaul, at the e4m Red Carpet Experiential Marketing Summit.