Exactly What Is "Experiential Marketing?"

I recently joined a discussion group, Adrants, to learn more about what’s going on in marketers’ minds around the country.

This morning I got into a thread devoted to defining “experiential marketing.” I was inspired to respond to one person’s definition of “experiential marketing” that left me a bit wanting:

With due respect, Brad, when I read experiential marketing defined as "a fusion of non-traditional modern marketing practices integrated to enhance a consumer's personal and emotional association with a brand," even as I thought the definition read a bit like bureaucratic prose, I wondered what you meant by "non-traditional modern marketing practices."

It seems to me that XM is a particular mindset rather than a system of marketing practices. After all, direct mail, point-of-sale promotions, programmatic product placement, broadcast communications, etc. are as applicable to XM as to any other approach to marketing.

By my lights, "experiential marketing" is the antonym of "product centric marketing," which makes "customer centric marketing" somewhat synonymous with "experiential marketing."

Importantly, the idea of experiential marketing reflects a right brain bias because it is about fulfilling consumers’ aspirations to experience certain feelings – comfort and pleasure on one hand, and avoidance of discomfort and displeasure on the other.

In contrast, traditional product centric marketing reflects a left brain bias because it generally seeks to persuade consumers by invoking rational factors that position the advertised brand as better than competing brands. Product centric marketing presumes a degree of rationality in consumers’ decision-making that contemporary brain science refutes. Consumers’ decisions are much more influenced by emotionally generated feelings than by their rationally derived thoughts.

I may have been the first person to talk about experiential marketing when I wrote about "products as gateways to experiences" in my book Serving the Ageless Market, written going on 17 years ago. 

Just as Serving the Ageless Market was going to press in 1989, for the first time in history people 40 and older became the adult majority. My prediction concerning the coming of a time when the customer experience would generally transcend product attributes in importance was based on a well-established tenet in adult development psychology.

Generally speaking, as people move through the second half of life they become less influenced by materialistic or physical values (such as heavily promoted in product marketing) and increasingly more influenced by experiential or metaphysical values. Thus a marketplace dominated by adults in the second half of life naturally more heavily reflects the worldviews, values and behavior of consumers in this age group than the worldviews, values and behavior of the young.

In essence, then, experiential marketing is not an innovative creation of marketers so much as a response to the more mature “mind of the market” that exists today.

Comments

[Atare Agbamu]

David --
Taking experiential or metaphysical marketing into the political marketing arena, it is possible that Karl Rove and President Bush's marketing team have digested the kernel of DRM. Witness the 'right brain issues' that galvanized the New Customer Majority to the polls last November. Please send AGELESS MARKETING to marketing brains at the Democratic National Committee.

-- Atare Agbamu

[Yvonne DiVita]

David, I'm wondering if you're as amused -- and not in a laughing sort of way -- by the really BAD commercials on prime time television today. They are not following any of your excellent guidelines and can only be created by "kids"...IMHO. My fiance often give each other the, "What were they thinking?" look after many of these commercials. The question is: do they actually sell anything? Are they meant to sell anything? And...where were the grown-ups when the ad was approved? God help us if the agencies and TV studios are overflowing with "kids" who put this stuff out there. Maybe we need to start a TV station just for grown-ups--one that not only has better commercials but better shows! You game?

[David Wolfe]

Atare:

You seem to understand why Carl Rove has been named as the "Marketer of the Year" for 2004. You also seem to ubderstand that the Dems don't know a whole lot about marketing. Thanks for your comments.

Yvonne:

Yes -- but maybe bemused is a better word to describe reactions of members of the New Customer Majority to the Madison Avenue nonsense foisted upon us in advertising today. Advertisers waste billions of dollars annually courtesy of graphically brilliant creatives who are neverhteless challenged by a disgraceful lack of understanding of human behavior, especially in the second half of life.

Thanks for your comments! DBW

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[Jo Muse]

I appreciate your thoughts. Seems to me that the notion of experiential marketing is rooted in the knowledge that consumers actually, see, sense, act and feel with great regard for what they are experiencing about a brand. Their life. Or a great deal of other more heady stuff. Fact is culture plays a more consistent role in this business of communication and the consumer marketing experience. Nows the time for antropology to make have a real impact on the advertising business.

[David Wolfe]

Jo:

You couldn't get stronger agreement from me RE: anthropolgy. But I also think adult development psychology offers much to inform marketers, a topic I write about extensively in my latest book, Ageless Marketing.

Thanks for your comments, Jo.

[David Wolfe]

Jo:

Forgot -- given you interests in anthropology, I suggest you sign up for teh Hatman Groups Newletter, Hartbeat. I consider Harvey Hartman and his group to the the intellectual leaders in cultural anthropology as applied to the marektplace.

If you type "Hartman" into the search engine on my blog site, you find several articles about the Hatman Group.

DBW

[Christabel]

Dear David

Many thanks for this piece of information. Just in time for my Monday paper. Greatly appreciate it!

Cheers
BeL™ †

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