Earlier this month we held a roundtable session focused on the ever-debated, multi-faceted world of measuring the impact and effectiveness of experiential marketing.
It was a lively morning of in-depth discussion with contributions from all sides of the fence –brands, agency and the all-important consumers.
To help you out, we’ve boiled the morning’s discussion down to four key take outs:
The marketing commonplace that “people today want more experiences” is too shallow to be taken at face value.
Yes, people do want more experiences, but in reality people have always wanted experiences and by the nature of it, more of them. People want richer, more immersive experiences – but on the flip-side that means that low engagement experience can actually have the effect of being damaging to your brand. Read more about that in our related blog post here. Furthermore, due to the internet and social media, sharing experiences is now common place. To capitalise on this, brands should put their physical product at the heart of experiential.
There is no single, concrete way of measuring experiential
The silver bullet of experiential measurement… that’s what we all thought we were going to find out right? Well, despite multiple techniques that go some way towards tackling the problem, there is still no concrete way of measuring experiential and many brands and agencies still struggle to measure the impact and effectiveness of experiential. Ultimately, there is no single way (and unlikely ever will be) to measure experiential activity. This is because each campaign or activation will be different, so how you measure impact should be considered accordingly. However, the overriding point to take away is that by getting closer to the people and organisations that have the data that can validate activities, agencies can build out more effective measurement models
Testing, testing
An avenue less talked about, but equally important, is pre-testing. When major brands put out a piece of ATL advertising, they will have tested it with enough rigour to know pretty well what its effect will be. Using the same principles with experiential campaigns will provide a good starting point for measuring impact and effectiveness, setting the campaign up for success. An example of this thinking in action is our work with Green & Blacks for the brand’s Velvet Fruit range where we tested three scenarios and applied neuroscience techniques to measure positivity amongst subjects.
Cost Per Sample is dead
There, we said it! And we’ve been saying it for a while now. The only way the measurement problem can be overcome is by moving away from cost per sample as the main reference point. As HeyHuman’s research shows, the quality of samples given away can make much more of an impact on consumers than a larger quantity – delivering a better ROI. If these insights have got you thinking, or you want to find out more on any of these points, then please get in touch.