What Are Brand Activations?
Brand activations are marketing experiences intended to create brand awareness and connect with the target audience. Brand activations directly engage prospective customers and encourage them to interact with a brand in real time, rather than watch passively as the messaging unfolds. The ultimate goal: “to forge a lasting emotional connection between a brand and its ideal customers.”
- Up to 98% of consumers create brand-related social or other digital content at activations
- 70% of attendees become repeat customers post-experiential event
- 89% of attendees say they feel more connected to brands post-activation
- 48% of consumers say experiences are the best way to learn about brands
What Sets Activations Apart?
Of course, other marketing campaigns can elicit strong emotions. And brands can drive sales and build loyalty through many other means. What sets brand activations apart from traditional marketing? Approach and purpose. While traditional marketing focuses on delivering messages to an audience, brand activations emphasize creating experiences that allow consumers to personally connect with the brand. Experiential marketing focuses on connecting with consumers through memorable encounters.
Core Principles of Brand Activations
Brand activations aren’t just there to show participants a good time. They are designed to raise a brand’s profile in ways that lead to short-term sales and long-term loyalty. Experience has taught marketers that successful activations revolve around several core principles:
Focus on Authenticity & Integration
The activation must align with the brand’s values, voice, personality, and identity. Attendees aren’t fooled by insincere, forced or high-pressure sales experiences. Connecting with consumers from a place of authenticity, on the other hand, builds credibility and trust.
Strive for Emotional Connection
Successful activations tap into feelings like joy, nostalgia, excitement, and curiosity — positive emotions that create lasting positive impressions and strengthen loyalty. The activation should focus on delivering value or delight to the consumer, not just pushing a product. Understanding your audience’s desires, behaviors, and pain points is crucial to this process.
Provide Interactive Elements
Activations should encourage active involvement. This might mean sampling a product, playing a game, taking photos to share on social media, or speaking with brand ambassadors. Participation creates deeper and more memorable engagement than merely observing.
Drive Social Media Engagement
Make it easy (and tempting) for people to share their experience via social media. Visually striking elements help inspire your attendees to take photos and videos they’ll share with friends and family. This gives your activation reach beyond the live audience.
Succeed According to Relevant Metrics
Determine what represents success for your brand’s activation, and build key performance indicators into the event. With experiential marketing, return on investment isn’t always immediate sales — it can also be awareness, engagement, or data capture.
Why Are Activations So Effective?
Brand activations make strong impressions on consumers for many reasons. They evoke positive emotions, and when a consumer associates a positive feeling with a brand, that positivity transfers over to the brand in the consumer’s mind. Activations are also often multisensory, immersing participants in visual elements, sounds, textures, and often even smells and tastes associated with the brand. This approach makes activations uniquely memorable, as does novelty, which activates the part of the human brain that’s responsible for forming long-term memories.
There are also social aspects to this brand-consumer bond: Because the activation is a participatory experience, as opposed to a passive encounter, it conveys to consumers a sense of “belonging.” The consumer becomes part of the brand’s story through their engagement with the event.
Types of Brand Activations
The term “brand activation” encompasses a wide range of events: pop-up shops offering demonstrations and free samples; a decked-out food truck that distributes ice cream samples at the beach; or a 16-state mobile tour in a fully wrapped bus that contains a mini-salon and video game lounges. Which type of activation is right for your brand? That depends on the story you want to tell, and who you’re telling it to. It also depends on your brand’s personality, values, and target audience.
When brainstorming brand activation ideas, it’s important to focus on authentically representing the brand to your audience and creating a meaningful interaction with every participant. Activations that approach that challenge through immersive elements, interactive installations, engaging technology, and themed experiences make an indelible impact on attendees.
Immersive Activations
Experiential marketing events of all kinds make an emotional impact on participants. Immersive experiential marketing takes that experience to a new level.
An immersive activation is a physical manifestation of a brand’s personality and story. It’s a fantasy mini-world suffused with the brand’s visual identity, messaging, and story. By transporting visitors into these mini-worlds full of unexpected images and activities, immersive marketers hope to surprise and captivate audiences while informing them about the brand. This can involve physical elements like custom installations, or digital elements like virtual reality, augmented reality, or other technologies.
An important part of this is the transformation of the event’s physical space, which must be as complete as possible so participants feel like they’ve left the “real” world behind. Brand activation agencies are experienced in creating this kind of brand-centric realm. Immersive marketing is designed to engage participants at a deep emotional level by fully engaging their senses. This pulls participants into the brand itself, making them feel like part of the brand’s story, eliciting emotions and memories participants will carry with them long after the activation’s end.
Interactive Installations
Reshaping a space through strategic placement of custom installations is one way to create an immersive experience. Custom installations are branded physical setups that help transform the event space into an almost magical brand-centered world. Custom installations are designed to delight visitors and make a powerful impression by offering uniquely immersive experiences within experiences that excite participants, amplify brand messaging, create opportunities for social sharing, and foster deeper customer engagement with the brand.
Curated spaces offer another avenue for converting a space. In the context of experiential marketing, a curated space is like a gallery or museum, but instead of organizing the space around the objects, the focus is on the audience. “Curation is about turning the space into a story,” which means the space becomes a portal into the brand’s world, a life-size diorama of all things brand. A curated space is generally not transformed wholly as with custom installations, but the effect is just as powerful. These spaces, like other immersive marketing, are multisensory, using light, sound, texture, scent, and taste to convey the brand’s values and story.
Regardless of how the brand approaches the physical space, digital elements provide vital connective tissue between the event, participants, and the wider world. These could be truly interactive, like virtual reality and augmented reality, or they could be part of the messaging. Example: Bone broth brand Kettle & Fire staged an activation that took visitors on a tour through our food system, using technology throughout to provide interactivity and messaging. Other activations have invited visitors to push buttons and turn knobs to play games or get information. Tablets and touchscreens can offer information, run surveys, and collect visitors’ contact information. The tech could also be specifically geared toward social media photos ops. Photo booths create a fun, irresistible interactive experience; novel and eye-catching features of the event provide another way to get visitors clicking and sharing.
Technology-Driven Activations
Virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) can create a kind of instant immersion, helping participants feel more connected to the brand.
VR creates an opportunity to transport participants into virtual worlds that surprise and delight in 360 degrees. They can interact with objects, connect with other participants, explore environments, and take a journey through a landscape saturated with the messaging and narrative the brand wants to get across. Consumers can interact with virtual product models, allowing them to look at items from different angles and explore different sizes, styles, options, and colors.
Augmented reality allows users to overlay digital content, including images, over their surroundings, blurring the line between the digital and physical worlds. They can access these experiences through their phones, tablets, glasses, and other devices. Letting users seamlessly integrate these digital elements into their own environment helps them visualize how products will look and fit in their own space, enhancing their understanding and aiding purchase decisions. AR also enables customers to “try on” or experience products remotely. For example, AR-powered virtual fitting rooms show customers how apparel, jewelry, or accessories look on them without physically trying them on.
Themed Experiences
Themed experiences are immersive, story-driven activations that center around a concept or narrative that reflects the brand’s identity and emotionally engage the audience. Like immersive marketing, these experiences transport consumers into a curated “brand world” where everything from the visuals to the sounds to the interactions reflects a central theme.
One example: escape rooms, which combine entertainment and team problem-solving to create a memorable, emotionally charged experience. Escape rooms give brands an opportunity to create experiences that involve active participation and a high level of engagement as participants solve puzzles. The intensity of the atmosphere creates deep emotional connection with the brand, while the set of the escape room creates social media-ready photo ops.
Red Bull, for example, created a room in which participants completed extreme sports-inspired challenges to escape. The brand tied the experience — already exciting and compelling — to its identity and values, using the thrill of the game to create a memorable branded adventure.
Planning Your Brand Activation
Whether you plan to do the work yourself or seek out the brand activation services of an agency or consultant, planning a brand activation involves strategic thinking, creative execution, and logistical precision. The goal is to create a memorable experience that aligns with your brand and drives the outcomes you’re working toward, whether those are brand awareness, brand loyalty, or engagement. While planning an activation is a complex process, much of the work can be grouped into three categories: strategizing, concept development, and risk management.
Build the Strategic Foundation
Successful activation plans stem from a strategic foundation that includes goal setting, audience research, and budget planning.
Establish Clear Goals and Objectives
Increasing brand awareness, boosting sales, generating leads, launching a new product, or building customer loyalty are common goals for brand activations. The process of setting goals is about not only what you want to accomplish with the activation but also how you’ll measure its success. Make sure your KPIs align with your goals, that your activation goals are realistic, and that your plan includes means of measuring KPIs from the beginning of the process.
Identify the Target Audience
A good starting point is understanding your current customers — the people who are already interacting with your brand. Through surveys and other feedback tools, find out their preferences, why they chose your brand, what kinds of products they value, and what their challenges or pain points are. Study the analytics on social media and your website. Use “online listening” and read online reviews — these are rich sources of candid information and help develop a picture of how your brand and products are perceived. Interviewing loyal customers can help build a sense of why customers choose your brand and what your brand does better than the competition.
Use all of this information to create personas — fictional representations of customers that create a reference point as you plan. A brand activation agency can be particularly helpful with developing and using personas.
Create a Budget
Brand activations involve multiple moving parts: creative, logistics, tech, people, and promotion. A carefully planned budget ensures your activation delivers maximum impact without unexpected costs derailing the experience. Working with a brand activation agency can help you develop an estimate up front, and the agency’s connections with vendors can ensure you get fair prices for goods and services.
Develop Creative Concepts
Everything you learned while strategizing — especially about your target audience — should feed into brainstorming and other aspects of the concept ideation process. Focus on your brand’s values, intended messaging, and audience personas, and keep the conversation trained on brand activation goals and objectives. During this stage, everything’s up for grabs — stay open-minded, and pull in the outside perspective of a brand activation agency or consultant to ensure the concepts align with intended messaging.
Manage Risk
Contingency planning isn’t only about dramatic worst-case scenarios. Contingency planning should also cover anything and everything that could negatively impact the success of the event or the attendees’ experience. Contingency plans that account for many scenarios help minimize disruptions and ensure that if a problem occurs, you and your team don’t have to decide in the moment how to handle it.
Your plan should include the following:
- weather emergencies like flooding and tornadoes
- transportation, including not only challenges like parking limitations but also how goods and vendors will get to the event and what to do if they can’t. Consider how people will arrive at the event — and what you’ll do in the event of a serious breakdown that blocks access points.
- security of attendees, staff, and property
- communication breakdowns between your team and vendors, within your team, and between your brand and the audience; consider how you’ll get the word out if the event must be changed or canceled
- poor attendance; consider what your team will do to promote the event if attendance is low
Designing a Memorable Brand Activation
Designing your brand’s activation is where ideas first meet reality: What message are you trying to share with your audience, and how does it connect with your target audience? What are the physical experiential elements of your brand identity and personality? The answers to these questions will take the activation from concept to reality.
Design Principles
Starting with the sense of who your customers are — developed early in the process — brainstorm concepts that align with both their interests and your brand’s identity to find ways of translating that identity into an immersive experience. Research competitors to find ways to differentiate your brand. If appropriate, look for ways to tap into current events or trends. Focus on creating a cohesive experience that’s emotionally engaging. That’s the goal — to create an experience that resonates for attendees, forming positive associations they’ll connect to your brand. Apply these principles to help your ideas land the way you intend:
Consistency
Test every element against your brand identity. Does it align? These elements include not only visual identity but also personality and values. If your brand is playful, be playful, not serious. If your brand is exciting, reflect that in not only the interactive elements but also the look. Match your brand’s energy so that that’s what participants feel when they’re immersed in your activation.
Relevance
While there’s something to be said for going trendy, that might not accurately reflect what the brand is about. It’s more important to be relevant to your specific audience than to be on-trend with the broader culture.
Ease of Operation
The experience will be new for attendees — that’s part of the point — so make it easy for them to move through the event with signage or other directionals. If necessary, have street team members available to pull participants into the event and encourage exploration.
One Thing at a Time
Avoid unnecessary distractions or features that are fun, maybe, but don’t completely fit. Don’t try to convey every nuance of your brand personality all at once.
Shareable Moments
Create vignettes or backdrops the audience will find irresistible. Example: A successful pop-up for beauty brand Amika featured a series of rooms, with every surface and furnishing saturated with a single brilliant, on-brand color, a different one for each room. Other brand activations have used on-theme photo backdrops, both virtual and physical, with props to encourage creativity. Photo booths add a fun experience-within-the-experience and are a magnet for engagement.
Multisensory Engagement
Experiences that engage the multiple senses, instead of just sight and hearing, can dramatically enhance memorability and emotional connection. Seek ways to pull in touch, smell, and taste to more fully capture visitors’ imagination.
Production Elements
Brilliant concepts require careful execution. Because the goal of experiential marketing is to create a unique, positive experience, devote significant attention to the how of the event, not only the what and who, so the “real” world doesn’t hinder participants’ journey through the activation. This means ensuring the location meets the technical requirements of the event: location and logistics.
Technical Requirements
Consider tech aspects of the venue: Does it have cell reception? Is there adequate power supply for the technology involved? How is the internet connection? How important is technology to the experience you’re creating? Consumers expect to be able to use their devices, and they’re easily frustrated when technology stops them in their tracks as they move through the activation
Venue Considerations
Location matters. The public needs to be able to find the activation, so maximize visibility to your target audience by choosing an area they’re already familiar with and comfortable in. There must be adequate restroom facilities, and easy access for individuals with mobility issues. Consider weather conditions like temperature and precipitation — will participants be comfortable — as well as the distance between parking and the event.
Adequate Staffing and Training
To run smoothly, an activation needs enough people to guide participants, answer questions, and resolve any issues that arise. Brand ambassadors should be brought up to speed on the messaging and overall experience. Staff and street team members should be knowledgeable about products and the brand as well as trained in engagement tactics that align with the brand personality and identity as well as attendees’ comfort.
Measuring Success
How can you measure the experiential value of an activation? You can’t, at least not directly, But you can identify specific, trackable indicators and measure those to calculate return on investment. This section is about quantifying the success of a product you can’t touch, count or measure: experience.
Key Metrics
The goals of brand activations are often intangibles like brand awareness, attendee engagement, and customer loyalty. We can measure those intangibles via several means, such as using surveys and polls to measure brand awareness. Sales might seem like a straightforward metric, but other than sales made at the activation, it can be difficult to tell what’s attributable to the event and what would have happened anyway. Here are some metrics worth tracking for engagement, social amplification, and sales impact and how the data is gathered.
Engagement
During the event, engagement can be measured via numerous touchpoints between the activation and the consumer. Foot traffic counts, samples tried or handed out, swag distribution, participation in games or contests, and face-to-face contacts with staff and ambassadors all indicate engagement. Sensors and cameras offer sophisticated, detailed tracking of attendees as they move through the event, showing not only how many people pass through and how long they spend inside, but also where they stop and spend time and which displays or demos they breeze past. All of this data speaks to attendee engagement.
Social Amplification
Brands can use social media to promote the activation before the event; post photos and video during the event itself; and recap post-event, with user-generated reviews and other content. Brands can use QR codes and post their social media handles throughout the activation to make sharing easy. Post-event, the analytics generated by social media channels paint a clear picture of online engagement.
Sales Impact
Count the number of leads collected during the activation through email sign-ups, registration forms, or app downloads. Track these individuals post-event for longer-term metrics like repeat purchase rates and lifetime value.
Event-specific hashtags or coupons let brands track consumer behavior post-event. Compare baseline pre-event conversion rates from your website to conversions during and after the event.
Calculating ROI
Up to three-quarters of consumers say they are more likely to buy from a brand after an experiential marketing event, so even if the activation doesn’t include a point of sale, it’s well worth the effort to identify sales that factor into event ROI. Sales can pick up prior due to event promotions, and the sales boost from a brand activation can last weeks, with the biggest spike generally landing in the first week and tapering over time.
An ROI analysis that compares benefits gained to the costs incurred will clarify whether the activation was financially successful. These benefits can be in the form of sales, leads, or brand exposure.
Brand Activation Ideas & Inspiration
Here are some ideas tailored for three industries — retail, B2B, and consumer packaged goods — designed to drive engagement, increase brand awareness, and encourage brand loyalty:
Retail Brand Activation Ideas
Interactive Product Displays with AR/VR
Allow customers to virtually "try on" clothes, see furniture in their home, or visualize product features using augmented reality (AR) apps on tablets or mirrors, or virtual reality (VR) headsets for more immersive experiences. AR/VR technology is both interactive and engaging, delighting consumers while reducing friction in the buying process.
Themed Experiences
Create a highly curated, immersive pop-up shop within a larger retail space or a standalone location that tells a story around the brand or a specific product line. Why it works: Generates buzz, creates urgency, allows for creative storytelling.
Gamified Shopping Experiences
Integrate games or challenges into the shopping experience, offering discounts or prizes while encouraging exploration and driving conversion. Examples of gamified shopping include scavenger hunts for specific products, or a digital prize wheel for purchases over a certain amount.
B2B Brand Activation Ideas
Branded Lounge at Trade Shows
Create a relaxing, immersive space with product demos, food and/or beverages, charging stations, and comfortable seating. Attendees will find the change of pace and atmosphere refreshing, making them likely to stick around for a while. This creates opportunities for product sampling, brand storytelling, and other brand experiences.
Gamified Learning Booths
Educate prospective customers using interactive games like puzzles, discount wheels, or trivia to educate them on your brand’s products in a fun, memorable way.
Custom Installations
Demonstrate how your brand’s product or service works with physical or digital interactive setups tailored to your audience’s needs. These might use VR/AR technology or touchscreens in a custom installation that re-creates an environment relevant to the industry.
Product Sampling Campaign Ideas
Guerrilla-Style Sampling with Street Teams
Recruit trained ambassadors to hand out samples in high-traffic areas, pairing the samples with discount codes or interactive experiences like selfie stations with interesting backdrops.
AR Sampling Experience
Consumers scan the sample package to unlock a virtual demo, tutorial, or short story that brings the product to life.
Social Media Challenge
Encourage users to document their first-time experience using your brand’s product on social media in exchange for entry into a giveaway or a personal consultation with a brand ambassador or influencer.
Trending Brand Activation Concepts
Sustainability
Consumers increasingly want brands to demonstrate commitment to environmental and social causes, expecting authentic action that both makes sense for the brand and aligns with their values. Examples of relevant, authentic actions include using eco-friendly materials, reducing waste (e.g., zero-waste events, upcycled materials), utilizing renewable energy sources, and partnering with environmental organizations.
Hybrid Events
In a hybrid activation, the brand seamlessly blends physical (real-world) and digital (online) elements to create an immersive experience for attendees. This trend continues to evolve, with activations that live-stream physical events, offering special virtual components for remote attendees to serve as digital extensions of in-person activations.
Brand Activation Case Studies
Telling the Story of Our Flawed Food System
To highlight both its products and a pledge to sustainably source one of its key ingredients, bone broth brand Kettle & Fire and Promobile created an activation that took visitors on a journey through America’s deeply flawed food system and the practices Kettle & Fire has adopted for a healthier future. Staged in New York City’s SoHo neighborhood, the activation took over an existing space to create an immersive experience. Starting with a free sample of bone broth, guests walked through a multi-part journey that began with a mock grocery store that set the stage for an exploration of the “dirty secrets” in the U.S. food system. Flashlights and black light tech let guests reveal unhealthy ingredients hidden in seemingly wholesome foods. From there, guests moved into a section that mapped changes in farming practices over the last century, then explored a comparison of how meat, chicken, and vegetables have changed over time in unsustainable ways that reduce nutrient density. The journey concluded on a hopeful note, with a wholesome Thanksgiving tablescape.
Connecting with a New Generation of Readers
The 180-year-old Economist newsmagazine wanted to attract a new generation of readers. But how can a brand both capitalize on a longstanding reputation and demonstrate a commitment to and understanding of modern concerns? Working with Promobile, The Economist created a brand activation around educating the public on food waste and meat alternatives. The Economist partnered with like-minded food brands to host brand activations around mobile kitchens, manned by street teams. The activation won awards, helped the magazine gain more than 130,000 new subscribers, and generated $1.7 million in revenue.
Going Where Your Consumers Gather
Beauty brand Dove wanted to expand into a new market and promote its line of women’s deodorant by connecting with Gen Z women, as part of the brand’s broader mission to help women feel confident and realize their true potential. Dove partnered with Promobile to meet that audience where they are — specifically, at music venues and festivals in Los Angeles, New York, and Gulf Shores, Alabama. The activation created a massive boost in brand awareness, distributing more than 65,000 samples in Los Angeles, 75,000-plus in NYC, and some 31,000 in Gulf Shores.
Working with a Brand Activation Agency
When to Hire an Agency
While it’s possible for brands to plan and execute their own activations, hiring a brand activation agency can be a smart strategic move for brands looking to create memorable, impactful experiences. How can you tell when it’s time to hire?
Your Brand Is Launching a New Product or Entering a New Market
Agencies have deep expertise in market research — a piece of the marketing puzzle that’s essential in helping a new product or brand find its audience.
You Need Project Management and Logistical Support
Brand activation agencies are seasoned logistics and project management pros, “equipped to handle every aspect of conceptualizing, planning, drafting, crafting, and executing an event.”
You Need to Differentiate Your Brand from Competitors
An agency can help you develop an activation experience that’s authentic to your brand identity while highlighting your brand's unique value proposition and making you stand out.
What to Look for in a Partner
Choosing the right brand activation agency is crucial for the success of your campaign. It's an investment, so you want to ensure your agency understands your brand and can deliver results.
As part of your vetting process, ask to review case studies of the agency’s past brand activations — what did they do, why did they do it, what challenges did they face, and what measurable results did they achieve? Do they have experience across multiple activation types, including the ones that seem interesting or relevant to your brand?
Look for evidence of their experience in the following areas: project management, logistics, market research, data capture, and team staffing.
The Collaboration Process
The collaboration process between a brand and an agency depends on strong communication, mutual understanding, and creating a shared vision to bring a brand's essence to life through engaging experiences. Here’s a rough breakdown of how this process generally unfolds:
- Discovery & Onboarding
- The process begins with the brand providing a comprehensive brief or white paper covering brand identity, objectives for the activation, target audience, messaging, budget, and timeline. The agency will ask questions about the brand’s opportunities, challenges, unique value proposition, and overall marketing strategy.
- The Proposal
- The agency will develop a detailed proposal outlining a core concept for the activation, some preliminary creative ideas, recommended tactics, an estimated budget, an estimated timeline, and some KPIs they’ll track to determine event success.
- Proposal Review
- The brand will review the proposal, provide feedback, and negotiate terms. This phase involves back-and-forth discussions to ensure alignment.
- Kickoff
- Once the proposal is approved, contracts are signed, and a formal kickoff meeting is held with both the brand's and agency's core project teams.
- Creative Development & Feedback
- Working from information gathered during the discovery and proposal phases, the agency’s creative and strategy teams will brainstorm to translate the brief into executable individual concepts. The brand will then provide feedback on what they like and what they don’t, and this process will be repeated to refine concepts until a single concept is selected and refined.
- Detailed Planning
- The agency works on locating a venue, acquiring permits, and selecting and contracting with vendors such as A/V, catering, fabrication, security, and transportation; determines staffing needs; and creates visual assets like graphics, videos, and interactive elements.
- The Event
- The agency’s team oversees setup of the activation, making sure everything is in place and ready for the event. During the activation, the agency manages all staff, on-site operations, and participant flow. Issues are addressed as they arise.
- Teardown
- When the activation has ended, the agency team dismantles, packs up, and removes activation elements from the location.
- Data Analysis and Reporting
- The agency compiles data, including quantitative metrics (numbers of participants, social shares, leads) and qualitative feedback (participant comments, staff observations). This is used to build a comprehensive report detailing the event’s performance against the KPIs agreed upon during planning. Together, the brand and agency assess ROI.
If this sounds like a solid plan, we invite you to visit our website to get a quote for Promobile Marketing’s services planning and executing your next activation.
What’s Ahead for Brand Activations?
Emerging Technologies and Trends
Brand activations are rapidly evolving, and several emerging technologies are playing a crucial role in this transformation; here are a few:
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning
AI remains a game-changer for personalization. It can analyze real-time data on consumer behavior, preferences, and even emotional responses to tailor experiences on the fly. This enables entirely new types of interactions, such as real-time conversational holograms, content tailored to individual participants, and dynamic storytelling that evolves based on user input.
VR, AR, and MR
VR and AR will continue to evolve, helping to create immersive environments that transport users to virtual showrooms, product experiences, or even fantastical worlds and overlay digital information onto the real world, blending virtual and physical experiences.
Mixed reality (MR) combines elements of both VR and AR, allowing for more interactive and integrated experiences where digital objects can interact with the real world in a persistent way. Expect to see more “phygital” experiences, which blend physical and digital interactions for deeper brand engagement.
Haptic Technology
Haptic technology adds tactile feedback to experiences, adding the sense of touch into digital interactions. Imagine surfaces that change texture on demand, allowing consumers to "feel" different product materials without physical samples.
Internet of Things (IoT) and Wearables
Wearable devices like wristbands can trigger personalized content on screens based on proximity, help crowd management, and automate various event elements. These and other IoT devices can collect valuable data on user movements, engagement levels, and even biometric data, providing insights for hyper-personalization and campaign optimization.
Changing Customer Expectations
As the bar for brand activations is set higher, so too are customer expectations. Driven by technological advancements, evolving consumer behaviors, and a desire for more meaningful connections, customer expectations for brand activations are undergoing a significant transformation. Here are some of the major changes:
Active Participation
No longer content with merely observing an ad or product display, consumers want to be actively involved, to touch, feel, interact, and even contribute to the brand experience. This desire for hands-on engagement means a demand for interactive exhibits, workshops, challenges, and experiences where they can directly engage with the product or brand message.
Personalization and Co-Creation
Consumers expect brands to recognize them as individuals, understand their preferences, and deliver personalized content, recommendations, and interactions. Some consumers even expect opportunities to co-create content, personalize products, or offer input that influences the brand's direction.
Escapist Experiences
Consumers expect activations that engage multiple senses — sight, sound, touch (haptics), smell, and even taste — to create truly immersive and memorable experiences. They see activations as an opportunity for unique entertainment and a break from the ordinary.
Instant Gratification
Activations should be easy to access, navigate, and participate in — no long lines or complicated processes. Influenced by streaming and delivery services, there's an expectation for experiences to be available when and where the consumer wants them.
Social Shareability
Consumers want experiences that are unique and shareable, and they see activations as opportunities to create content. They expect to find social media-ready moments they can share. The continuing rise of social media influencers has also shaped expectations, with consumers seeking experiences that are endorsed or shared by people they trust.
In essence, customers now view brand activations as opportunities for genuine, personalized, and shareable experiences that go beyond traditional marketing. Brands that can deliver on these expectations will build stronger loyalty and stand out in the competitive landscape.
Ready to Start Planning Your Brand Activation?
Planning a successful brand activation requires meticulous attention to detail and a strategic approach. Here's a quick checklist for getting started:
1. Define your goals and objectives
Building brand awareness, boosting sales, increasing engagement, growing your email list? “By setting clear goals and objectives, you can ensure that your brand activation efforts align with your overall marketing strategy and deliver the desired outcomes,” says fastercapital.com.
2. Identify your target audience
Get to know them in terms of not only demographics and interests but also desires, needs, motivations, and pain points. Understanding your audience will “help you strategize ways to encourage deeper engagement and participation in your activation.”
3. Develop the creative concept
Choose the activation type and format that aligns with your needs, paying attention to “the sensory experience, brand alignment, interactivity, and uniqueness.”
4. Manage location, timing, and execution
Choose a location your audience already knows or will already be in to increase the chances that they’ll encounter your event spontaneously or be willing to seek it out based on social media and other advertising. Working with an agency that has deep expertise in the logistical aspects of brand activations can be enormously helpful in this regard.
5. Plan for measurement
Lay the groundwork for post-event analysis by establishing KPIs and ways to measure them from the very beginning. “Utilizing KPIs that align with the campaign's objectives provides valuable insights,” says Mailchimp. “Useful metrics may include engagement rates, increased brand awareness, social media impressions, website traffic, and conversion rates.
By carefully planning and executing your brand activation, you can effectively engage your target audience, achieve your marketing goals, and build a strong brand presence.
Ready to bring your brand activation to life? Connect with us! Request a quote to start building your brand experience.
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