Kraft's Stove Top brand has put heaters in 10 bus shelters in Chicago to deliver experiential marketing for its Stove Top brand.I think it's just a hot idea.The premise behind the experiential approach is that branding needs to be brought to life, or dimensionalized through experience, in order to be memorable.
It's a riff on the idea of sampling, only in this case consumers are getting a taste, whiff, or feeling that is relevant to a brand attribute, and not of a functional quality of a product or service.This is about when the idea gets kinda silly, of course. When a corporate spokesperson says "Stove Top as a brand has a great equity in the area of warmth," it belies the mistaken belief that warmth can be owned by some thing called a brand. You see such words connected to other words in boxes on branding presentations, but the only place you find them in the real world is when you go and ask people what they think about a brand. Warmth could have appeared in a multiple choice list (a trick called aided awareness)
.But Stove Top is onto something: It's doing something. Anything. Experiential marketing is a killer app for branding not because it brings to life any esoteric pretensions of connecting otherwise unconnected attributes to stuff, but simply because it makes a connection. Consumers huddled in bus shelters will feel comfortably warm when they see the Stove Top ad. It would be just as effective as a air conditioner blowing cool air in the summer.
Associating something pleasant with whatever it is that you're selling is a good thing. No words, nothing to deconstruct. On a cold day, warmth is a good thing. The medium is the message.Science has proven that people remember things better when 1) they're happier, and 2) when there's multiple sensory support for it.
We also know that there's no demonstrably reliable, causal link between good memories and subsequent purchase behavior, other than a broad "good awareness is generally better than bad, or non-awareness."So maybe experiential marketing is a chance for any brand name to use any sensory prompt, irrespective of whether or not it follows one of the dotted lines on a branding chart:Make check-out at the grocery fasterSlow down escalators when someone has trouble getting onEnsure that taxi receipts more easily gotten, or readableOur modern lives are full of opportunities for small, beneficial improvements; effect one, and attach your brand to the happier experience, and voila.
It'll be remembered better than the most creative, cutting-edge commercial.The approach still begs for a next step, however...a proverbial other shoe to drop, answering more substantively the why of doing it in the first place.For Stove Top, maybe the home-run component of the campaign would have been putting an SMS # on the bus shelter ad, so pleasantly toasty consumers could punch in a code and have a sample sent to their home. "Have a meal ready to warm up waiting for you" could have been the tag line, prompting a behavior to build upon the good sensations.But that would have been marketing and selling something, and this campaign is all about the brand. Oops. Thank goodness Stove Top has a great equity in the area of warmth.
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