Experience Marketing: Changing the Conventional Definitions

Introduction
Case 1:
When Virgin opened in New York a block away from one of Sony's CD stores, it offered CDs at a 12% discount. Hit in the bottom line, the Sony store decided to fight back by thinking laterally. It set up a multimedia booth which played not only whatever music people wanted to hear, but also suggests other choices. It was very interactive. So people ended up paying 12% more for the CDs just for the fun of the experience.
Case 2:
Johnson & Johnson’s launched its pain relief product ‘Tylenol 8 Hour’ in partnership with US gym chain Bally Total Fitness. The company developed six training programmes inspired by high-performance sport, sponsored the New York marathon and organized "paint the gym red" events. A tie-in with the National Trainers Association provided a nontraditional distribution channel. The product turned out to be Johnson & Johnson’s biggest product in 20 years.
Customers are every company’s most valuable asset. Companies need to retain existing customers and to attract new ones in order to survive and grow. Companies of all kinds claim to recognize that their customers are important. But what kind of experience
are they providing for customers with their products, their services, their communications, and their interactions?
How are customers really being treated? The answer is often "badly," despite all the protestations to the contrary. Some examples for the same could be waiting
in lines in supermarkets or on the phone, products that are perfect for someone else’s lifestyle or work environment, but never ours, unusable web sites, uninspiring ad campaigns, or unresponsive customer service etc. The list is endless.
In both the above cases, what was the common link which led to success and/or thwarting of a potential threat from a competitor? The company provided the customer an experience which differentiated the offering from the competing alternative. In Tylenol’s case, the company made the customer feel that the makers of Tylenol care about the sport and development, about her experience of sport, rather than merely flogging the product. The idea was to place the product at the "point of pain", where it would be most relevant to users.
This is Experience Marketing - a new paradigm in the field of marketing which has the potential to change the marketing landscape for ever and for the better.
In this paper, we will try to comprehend the concept and philosophy of Experience marketing. We will analyze the gaps in traditional marketing due to which the need for experience marketing arose and also have a look at some more path breaking success stories. The final section deals with the strategy which the marketers need to adopt for providing consumers with an engaging and memorable experience.
Experience Marketing: The Concept




"An experience occurs when a company uses services as the stage - and goods as props - for engaging individuals in a way that creates a memorable event."
- Joseph Pine and James Gilmore, the Experience Economy, Harvard Business Review.
Experience marketing is said to be practiced when marketers go beyond meeting basic needs to excite the consumer, to build consumer enthusiasm by becoming part of the every day life experiences of the shopper.
The experiential approach seeks to identify behaviors (or attitudes or value sets) held in common across an audience whose demographic characteristics – the traditional basis of segmentation – might be quite diverse. Once you resonate with that value set, it becomes emotional.
Experience marketing is about finding insights about people’s passions and the connections which are created – naturally and uniquely – between them and the equity in the brands.
Experience marketing is not a rant about using new media or old media. It’s about companies creating their own media, their own unique experiences of the brand which are simply irreplaceable. The experiences are central to the brand’s marketing approach, not a bolt-on to an expensive TV campaign.
The Need for Experience Marketing
Marketing flounders at many companies today. The causes range from the demise of mass markets, the ineffectiveness of many traditional forms of advertising and the seeming failure of many businesses to use the World Wide Web as an effective marketing vehicle. In response, consultants flood bookstores with new marketing concepts offered as cure-alls, including attention marketing, guerilla marketing, permission marketing, viral marketing and even emotion marketing. Each concept may have something valuable to say about how the environment has changed but none really addresses the core problem: People have become relatively immune to messages broadcast at them.
There’s no question that marketing is more challenging than ever. The media has become more fragmented. Customers are increasingly media savvy and media weary. There are now freethinking customers who don’t fit neatly into researchers’ tick boxes.
A well-attended product launch may have delivered rapturous applause but for how long? Most importantly, will customers remain emotionally attached?
Consumers have changed the way they respond. No one has time anymore. Everything has to be done quickly. If it's not entertaining them or engaging them or evoking emotion, they're not paying attention. So if a product has to be sold or the needle has to be moved in any way, focus has to be on how one is going to attract that consumer. And if the company is not creating an experience, it is not attracting the consumer of today.
Customers don't remember the event; they remember the experience. It's not the page they just touched, its how they feel after they touched it or looked at it or read it. It's all about experience.
An ongoing emotional attachment between brand and customer is the ultimate aim of experience marketing, in an era where marketers struggle with audience connection in a cluttered world. The delivery is through a unique experience which can only be created by the brand – giving brand owners a higher control. These in turn allow people to understand the brand at another level by being active – rather than passive-in relation to the brand.
Conventional and Experience marketing: The difference
"Traditional marketing was developed in response to the industrial age, not the information, branding and communications revolution we are facing today."
- Bernd Schmitt
Conventional or traditional marketing presents an engineering-driven, rational, analytical view of customers, products and competition. It is based on a features and benefits approach. In this (traditional) model, consumers are thought to go through a considered decision-making process, where each of the features or characteristics of a particular product or service are seen to convey certain benefits, and these are all assessed by the potential purchaser (either consciously or unconsciously). However, this is far too limited a way of viewing the purchase decision, with excessive emphasis on the rational and logical elements of the decision, and not enough on the emotional and irrational aspects involved in the purchase.
Experience marketing changes marketers' view about what they are selling. Until recently, they saw experience as a means to an end: a better way to sell a product or service. Increasingly, it's the other way round: the product or service as a means of selling the experience.
But like all big "new" ideas, the idea of experience marketing is not new. Companies such as Disney have been ploughing this furrow for decades. Airlines have struggled with its application for years. So have marketers worrying about customer service and those moments of truth, when customer meets company. But there is a difference. Traditionally, marketers have accepted that grocery, clothes, transport and banking companies sell groceries, clothes, transport, and financial services - and that the entertainments industry sells pleasurable experiences.
Yet buying and using groceries, clothes, transport, and financial services are also experiences and their marketers need to make them as enjoyable and fulfilling as possible. Traditional advertising, such as the 30-second TV spot, is often criticized for being one-way (as opposed to two-way) and mass (as opposed to personal). But it's also lifeless and two-dimensional. An ad may express powerful emotions, but it's still just a lifeless representation. Experience -engaging all human senses in all dimensions - is the "real thing". The challenge now is for marketers to "dimensionalise" their brands.
Companies compete by tweaking functional features through brand positioning maps and conjoint analysis, fight "brand wars" through price wars and equity-destroying promotions and so forth. While such strategies may work for a while, they miss the very essence of a brand’s true equity: its potential to be a source of sensory, affective, and cognitive associations that result in memorable and rewarding brand experiences. On the other hand, experiential marketers focus primarily on customer experiences. They consider the entire consumption situation, move along the socio-cultural consumption
vector and ask what products fit into a given consumption situation and how design, packaging and advertising can enhance the consumption experience.
Experience Marketing: Some more cases
Experience marketing is not about giving marketing promotions more sensory appeal by adding imagery, tactile materials, motion, scents, sounds or other sensations. Such experience marketing only affects marketing materials; it does not change the fundamentals of how companies can attract and retain customers. Rather than experience marketing, companies should market the experiences, that is, create absorbing venues- real or virtual- where customers can try out offerings, as they immerse themselves in the experience. The following examples are few such cases where companies have tried to do exactly that.
1.
2. The ‘Insperience’ Experience:
3. Insperience is a studio by Whirlpool and KitchenAid Brands in Atlanta, United States. The Insperience Studio provides an interactive experience where consumers can learn about new and exciting products by Whirlpool and KitchenAid Brands. The studio has equipped kitchens where people can try out the latest Whirlpool and KitchenAid brand home appliances. It invites shoppers to bring chores with them. It acts as a learning laboratory for the company to study what the consumers actually want.
4. The Lord of the Rings:
5. It can be said to be the most successful pre-show for any Hollywood movie. New Line Cinema, film unit of AOL Time Warner, launched an officially managed web-site of the movie, The Lord of the Rings: the fellowship of the Rings, two-and-a-half years before the movie premiere and also coordinated information sharing with the myriad fan sites. New Line produced an unprecedented success, with over one billion site visits prior to the opening of the film.
6. Legoland Theme Parks:
Lego, a toy manufacturer, has created fascinating experiences through its theme parks. These theme parks are so engaging that guests find it worthwhile to pay for them. Charging admission for experiences opens the way to new offerings and profit possibilities through innovating new offerings, and is the logical consequence of recognizing experiences as distinct economic offerings.
4. Saffola: The Healthy Heart Foundation
Saffola Healthy Heart Foundation is an initiative started by the brand Saffola in 1993, which seeks to educate consumers about heartcare and healthcare. The Foundation attempts to provide quality information, resources and counseling to the maximum number of people, free of cost. Under the auspices of the foundation, a website- www.healthykhana.com - has also been initiated. The service is restricted to the nutrition aspect of preventive healthcare. Visitors to the site can access an online diet planning software, which give sample diet plans for the various regional cuisines. The site also provides information regarding various diseases like diabetes, hypertension, obesity etc.
5. The Parryware ‘Experiencentre’:
‘Experiencentres’ are an attempt by Parryware (manufacturers of bathroom basins, tubs etc.) to provide complete bathroom solutions. The novel concept is the result of the company's understanding that each bathroom is unique and a reflection of the individual's personality. At the Centre, one can design a bathroom to suit individual preferences and needs with the help of special design software. This friendly software enables the user to specify the bathroom area and choose products from the extensive Parryware range to get the desired look and mood. The Centre also displays the extensive range of Parryware products in a spacious and modern ambience and provides complete information on all products.
The list can include more cases like ‘Prestige smart kitchen' concept galleries, Barista coffee house etc. The point that the above examples emphasize on is that we have entered the "experience" economy. Whether you make a product or sell a service, what you really need to do is stage an experience that is memorable and compelling. That is what the consumer values most.
Experience marketing: Strategy for success
Before a business can consider an experience marketing approach, it has to be clear what its brand essence really is. It has to demonstrate everything it’s about. It is both emotional and functional. The essence or brand
proposition question is the hardest. The functional essence, [what the product does], is easy, but there also needs to be a timeless emotional essence. The best way to create a brand experience is to do something out of the ordinary for your audience. Make it touch their soul.
Many goods encompass more than one experiential aspect, opening up areas for differentiation. Apparel manufacturers, for instance, could focus on the wearing experience, the cleaning experience, and perhaps even the hanging or drawering experience. Other industries might create the briefcasing experience, the wastebasketing experience, or the mask-taping experience. If the manufacturer starts thinking in these terms ‘inging’ his things, he'll soon be surrounding his goods with services that add value to the activity of using them and then perhaps surrounding those services with experiences that make using them more memorable.
Whatever the concept, the future will be about extending connections through offering an experience as the companies search for ever more-creative ways to connect with their valuable customers (who take five times more marketing spending to attract than to retain). Some guidelines for devising an experience marketing strategy can be:
1. Creating a consistent theme that resonates through the entire experience.
2. Building the experience platform.
3. Structuring the customer interface.
4. Layering the theme with positive cues and easy-to-follow signs.
5. Eliminating negative cues that distract or contradict the theme.
6. Offering memorabilia that commemorates the experience.
7. Seeking to engage all five senses.
Integration of the experience, meaning consistency across touch points, is also a very important issue. Many companies are doing a poor job because they deal with an ad agency, a graphic designer and outside consultants and everybody creates ultimately something else. So, while each of these elements might be good, none is integrated.
So the companies should aim for consistency across the entire spectrum of contact points.
Another aspect of a successful marketing strategy is innovation. The customers should always be inundated with new experiences ably supported by quality products and services.
Conclusion
Many marketing issues are not a problem of the logo or the advertising. These are customer experience issues. To address these issues effectively requires more than policing of corporate identity standards or soul-searching about the company’s values and the meaning of its brands. What is needed is, first, an original understanding of the customer’s experiential world and, second, the creation of a differentiated strategy platform that can be implemented in an innovative fashion. Great brands are the result of great, and consistent, customer experiences.
In sum, what attracts customers to any company and sustains their loyalty to its products, services, and brands, is the customer experience. That experience encompasses products, service, communications, and every interaction the customer has with the company.
Peter Drucker rightly articulated in ‘The Practice of Management’:
"The aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous".
To this we can add:
The aim of experiences is to make marketing superfluous.