An overview of experiential marketing

When I look back on my day, I’m amazed at the range of emotions I have gone through, from depression to indifference to ecstasy. Every minute has been an experience - sometimes pleasant, sometimes unpleasant, and then there are those experiences…that I would give anything to relive.

Apart from its utility, it is because the product touches them in more ways than one. Today’s marketer sees the potential to cater to their senses by breaking through the traditional ‘features-and-benefits’ marketing to launch ‘experience marketing’ - what can be described as a new way of catering to the evolving market.

Experiential marketing is a new approach for the branding and information age. It deals with customer experiences and is quite different from traditional forms of marketing, which focuses on functional features and benefits of products.

[...] - Walt Whitman The best part about experience marketing is that it is an all encompassing concept that has no fixed limits or a clearly distinguishable domain. There are certain areas, however, which possess tremendous scope for its applicability. These defined areas are in congruence with the three aspects of emotions, senses and occasions. High emotional involvement - This is the best opportunity, as also the biggest challenge, for a marketer to give the consumer a complete experience, without actually selling anything tangible. [...]

[...] I think that is because people want to live in a certain lifestyle, they want to drive a car that is more fun to drive than their normal, professional Lexus or BMW. So the notion of "Act" is always about actual behaviors or broader lifestyles. There are different ways of communicating "Act." On the Web one can do it through Flash animations, for example. On television, one can do it through some very fast-paced advertisement. In an environment, one can do it by having a lot of different sensory stimuli coming together--very bright, fast, changing images. [...]