What does experiential marketing entail? It entails allowing a customer/prospect to engage & interact with a brand, product, and service in sensory ways that provides an additional intimate level of experience and information.
Personal experiences help people connect to a brand & make intelligent & informed purchasing decisions. “Experiential Marketing” refers to actual customer experiences with the brand/product/service that drive sales and increase brand image and awareness.It is the difference between telling people about features of a product or service and letting them experience the benefits for themselves.
Many think of this as a totally separate form of marketing from social, but to me it is the ultimate in social marketing. It is all about experiencing a product or brand… and what could be more social. In addition the power of social is not the initial reach, but the engagement and more importantly the sharing that follows and enables a brand to reach into each individual’s social graph. How better to do that than to give a consumer an “experiential” experience to share.
Ted Rubin
People often get hung up on original definitions of terms. Ted, you make very valid points. Of course “experiential marketing” has a social side, even more so if products and brands can be physically engaged with among a group of friends, or connected people. And certainly, depending on the demographic, they’ll be talking up the brand experience on Facebook, Twitter, etc. to make that leap into the virtual social world and pass the buzz further along their social chains.