Brands are needing to communicate their brand stories with more authenticity than ever to meet the demands of ever-changing consumer behaviour, says Ceri Gravelle of eventeem

Telling the brand’s story has never been so key in the experiential industry. With consumers becoming more and more savvy to commercialism, promotional staff are needing to communicate product information and the brand’s story to the tiniest of detail at experiential events.

Consumers want to know if a product is gluten free, vegan, cruelty free, recyclable, organic and along with this, they want an authentic brand story that they can believe in.

Ensuring promotional staff have strong knowledge and clear passion for the product is so important in order to win over the consumer. That means employing promotional staff who are the right fit for the brand is vital.

They need to be able to demonstrate genuine knowledge of the product – for instance, if what’s being promoted is an organic and gluten free product, you need staff who are passionate about organic foods or eat gluten free products themselves, so they can offer genuine interaction with the consumer.

As always, consumers need to ‘buy’ the person before they buy the brand.

Over the past couple of years, clients have been putting more creative thought into the way they communicate brand’s stories to meet the changing behaviour of consumers. One of the key trends has been bringing individuals involved in the production of the product to the sampling events – for example, for the Rachel’s Organic Yoghurt brand, the Welsh dairy farmers who supply the organic milk for ‘Rachel’s’ came along to sampling events.

With the consumers being able to interact with the people involved in the production first-hand, the brand story becomes more reliable and trustworthy, and the customer is more likely to become invested in the product.

Not all clients are able to provide this kind of interaction, but for those that can, it creates a level of authenticity that consumers buy into and that resonates, driving more loyalty, sales and increased brand affinity in the long run.

Another emerging trend over the past year or so is the amount of thought being put into the times of day and the location of an experiential event. If you are promoting a breakfast product, for example, then organising sampling in the mornings around busy commuter areas like train stations will give people on their way to work the chance to try it at breakfast time.

By sampling a product where and when it’s supposed to be used like this, the consumer is better educated and the product becomes so much more useful and relevant to them. Even if you’re running these events in locations with lower footfall, if your activity mirrors the consumer’s real life behaviour, it will have a bigger impact.

Historically, measuring the success of an experiential food or drink sampling campaign has been difficult. The usual protocol is to measure how many products have been distributed, how many people interacted with the staff, and the customer feedback.

But marketing and brand managers are becoming more accountable for their budgets, so they’re having to provide evidence of campaign success in more detail than ever before — and this includes how the consumer’s behaviour has been affected by the campaign and the Return on Investment (ROI) from live engagements.

The industry is trying to tackle the issue of ROI measurement in experiential – so the Institute of Promotional Marketing (IPM) is developing on a new model to evaluate the effectiveness of experiential which explains how behavioural change of consumers by live engagement should and can be measured. The IPM has put together key principles and a step-by-step approach to how this can work, for pop-up retail, creative sampling, gamification live stunts and performances, to name a few.

This new model will be rolling out over the next 12 to 24 months and will be a huge benefit to those in the experiential industry looking to emphasise the worth of sampling. I know we at eventeem will definitely be looking to utilise it to evaluate our sampling success.

Ceri Gravelle is Managing Director and founder of promotional staffing and experiential agency, eventeem, which specialises in the organisation and staffing of sampling events.

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The Institute of Promotional Marketing has launched a major year-long project, the Experiential Marketing Framework, to create an industry-agreed effectiveness model for experiential campaigns, and has recruited leading brands and agencies to help it validate an experiential measurement model.

Brands involved include Sky, Dorset Cereals, Fuller’s and St Austell Brewery, while agencies include Circle, Wasserman, Jack Morton, Leith, PrettyGreen, TRO, The Bridge, Ambient, Curb, Haygarth and Wolf Brand Experience. Other partners are measurement specialists RedRoute International and the University of West of England’s Business School.

The IPM, the UK marketing industry trade body for promotional and experiential marketing, says the objective is to measure pre-and post-experience audience behaviour and look at benchmarks around increasing brand affinity, increasing purchase intention, behaviour change, engagement dwell time, Return on Investment, cost per contact and reach.

Carey Trevill, Managing Director of the IPM, says: “We know experiential works – but in an increasingly results-driven marketplace, we have to be able to prove it and also work out exactly which approach works best for different brands, different audiences and different locations. Without a standardised industry benchmark, even the most the exceptional work that is produced will struggle to answer the question, did it work and can you prove it? We’ve been working on this project for more than two years now, and it’s time to open it up to a wider audience to help us prove the effectiveness of experiential, show how it works with other channels including digital and drive even more growth in the sector.”

Jessica Hargreaves, Managing Director of agency PrettyGreen and Chair of the IPM Experiential Council, says: “We know that many agencies and brands are diligently working to analyse their own campaigns to prove experiential effectiveness.  However, for these results to be taken seriously, we need industry standards and it became clear that by collaborating our learnings and methodologies we can create benchmarks and start to build a solution that can deliver trusted results.”

Steve Messenger, a Director of RedRoute International, adds: “The campaigns that have trialled the framework approach so far have been able to demonstrate to their clients the positive ROI that experiential provides in ways that they understand and have confidence in. Obtaining more evidence through further use across a wider range of campaigns and situations will serve to strengthen that body of knowledge and also contribute to the marketing industry’s wider efforts to demonstrate marketing effectiveness.”

The IPM is looking to recruit more brands and agencies to help in the project and has published an outline of the project which can be downloaded from www.theipm.org.uk.

Carey Trevill points out that, although experiential is recognised as the fastest-growing non-digital element of the marketing mix, there is currently no standard industry-agreed approach to experiential evaluation, which experts argue is putting some clients off investing in the sector.

According to estimates from Campaign and Event magazines, agency brand experience budgets were £171.9m in the 12 months to June 2016, with the spend in London  alone standing at at least £81.4m.

The IPM aims to work on evaluation tools that will cover reach, impact and ROI from Experiential Marketing campaigns in order to improve confidence in the strategic benefits of experiential. At the same time, it wants to create common industry standards, benchmarks and terms for experiential marketing practice and enhance the reputation of the experiential marketing industry.

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