Introducing a brand to consumers is the first step in the branding that creates the first awareness about the brand. When you advertise your brand, consumers start getting familiar with it. This step is significant because it ensures brand recognition at first sight. It is the first step in establishing a brand by bringing it in front of consumers that make them curious to know more about it. Consumers start expecting that you would be telling them more about the brand and this offers excellent opportunities of taking the next step to get close to potential consumers. Since consumers are already aware of the brand, the stage is ready for creating consumer experience with the brand. Now is the time to bring the brand to life and start interacting with consumers to uphold it in its right perspective that could benefit consumers.
Injecting life into the brand is what brand activation is all about, and today, it is an all-important activity when you are launching a new brand or even if you are going for rebranding. To activate a brand, you have to take consumers through some brand experience so that they can explore various facets of the brand that builds trust and confidence in it. It is just not enough that consumers take note of brands but they must get as an opportunity of getting as close as possible to it. It would make it easy for them to connect with the brand by knowing every detail about it so that they can evaluate its usefulness.
Creating a memorable brand experience
To generate brand impact on consumers, it is crucial for marketers to take all steps in ensuring a memorable experience for consumers with the brand. It is an excellent way for companies to stand out from the crowd and become visible. It is an exciting journey that companies have to undertake when they decide to take their brand through various stages from conceptualization to familiarization thereby adding more value to it in the process. The trust that the brand earns from consumers determines its value, which would not have been possible without taking measures in activating the brand. That is why brand activations acquire so much importance in marketing today. Activation makes brands glow in the dark so that it not only becomes highly visible to consumers but they can even get a feel for it.
Activating a brand involves various kinds of activities, and in this article, we will discuss some methods that are useful.
Experiential marketing
In the past few years, the concept of experiential marketing has started gaining popularity because of its ability to provide results. In simple terms, it means exposing your brand in front of consumers to allow them to experience it firsthand. The strategy of experiential marketing is to create a real-life experience for consumers so that they remember it for a long time. Irrespective of the engagement any advertisement campaign has, it does very little to enhance the brand recall capability of consumers. People might be impressed with the advertisement instantly but usually forget the brand sooner than later just because they had only seen it but did not interact with it.
Here experiential marketing makes a lot of difference. Consumers get a feel for the brand, and the experience with the brand embeds deep into their minds that they would always refer to it at the slightest pretext. The power of recalling the brand goes up many more times.
Looking beyond grabbing attention
While grabbing attention is at the core of any advertising and marketing campaign, experiential marketing goes a step ahead and looks beyond it. The marketing method is different because it aims at appealing to the emotions of customers by creating a real-life situation in which consumers can try out the products so that the experience remains deeply entrenched in memory. They do not have to depend on inputs from other sources. When you allow consumers to lay their hands on the products, you demonstrate how confident you are about its quality and features. The feel of the products leaves an indelible mark in their memory that brings them closest to the brand that they start identifying it with themselves.
Emotional bonding
The speciality of experiential marketing is that it creates an emotional bond with consumers that no other marketing methods can. When creating the real-life experience, you have to entrust the job to a professional company that specialises in brand activation and live events so that consumers can immerse along with the brand in a fun and memorable experience. The brand can stir positive responses among consumers, and those emotions create a bond between the brand and consumers who can never forget it.
In-store brand activation
It is similar to experiential marketing when you organize an event at the store and bring the brand in front of customers so that they can touch and feel it. Organizing a promotional event at the store would help you to display the brand and give consumers a chance to interact with it. By using immersive technology, you can engage in storytelling or something similar that presents the brand in a completely different light as it strikes the right chords with consumers.
Sampling campaigns
Sampling campaigns are a variant of experiential marketing without some of the promotional elements that accompany experiential marketing. In this type of marketing, let the brand do the talking as you tell consumers nothing about it but offer them to try out free samples. It would appear that it is a free distribution campaign where the intent of marketing remains camouflaged. Be creative with campaign and time it right so that you get the best result because product samplings can accelerate purchases as consumers are more convinced about buying it.
Once you know the various touch points of consumer experience, it becomes easy to determine how to link up those experiences to activate the brand.