Planning a Multi-City Brand Activation Tour

When condiment brand Sir Kensington’s launched their new egg-free vegan mayo, Fabanaise, they knew the best way to win over fans and new customers was to let them taste the product. Working with Promobile, the Sir Kensington’s marketing roadshow took Fabanaise samples to 83 stops across 20 states. The event was a success, increasing revenue by 105%.

Used by brands across many industries, roadshow marketing takes a brand on the road to meet potential customers in their own cities and in places where they congregate, like beaches, festivals, business districts, and college campuses. A traveling brand activation like Sir Kensington’s takes meticulous planning and marketing expertise; here are some logistical aspects to consider when planning your brand’s roadshow.

Location

Start with Personas

Just as with a stationary activation or pop-up, roadshow planning benefits from creation of attendee personas — fictional representations of different segments of the target audience. In addition to shaping the design and content of the roadshow, personas can (and should) shape which locations the tour visits.

Consider the goals for the roadshow: Boost sales? Launch a new product? Increase brand recognition? Working from the goals you want to achieve and what’s known about who your customers are, determine which audiences you want to reach. Next, do the market research to find out where they are.

An example: Flavored water brand Lemon Perfect wanted to reach a target audience of diverse, hydration-obsessed Millennial and Gen Z consumers. The brand chose geographically diverse cities with strong populations of these young consumers, then strategically positioned branded vehicles where they congregate. The nationwide sampling-driven roadshow ultimately handed out 300,000 samples.

Location Characteristics

Location characteristics such as climate, demographics, population density, and income levels influence the success or failure of a roadshow. Even within the market you’ve selected, some neighborhoods or areas will be better or worse for the event due to traffic patterns, visibility, accessibility, space, and potential disruptions, notes an article on showplace.co.uk. All of this is why choosing a location requires more analysis than simply identifying markets with a high concentration of people the same age of the target audience.

For example, are there climates or regions where your products connect with local traditions or satisfy a unique need? A recent tour by beauty brand Amika took this approach when the brand chose cities for its newest hair care product, an anti-frizz treatment. The brand’s “frizz mobile” targeted consumers in four famously humid American cities — Nashville, Austin, Houston, and Miami — to promote the product to its target audience.

Timing

Timing is an easily overlooked but critical consideration in choosing locations for a roadshow. A roadshow can run for half a year or more. What major holidays overlap with the proposed dates, and how are they marked in the selected cities? What locally significant celebrations or events are happening in the selected cities, and how might your brand align aspects of the roadshow with those events?

“Consider combining your mobile tour with holidays or regional events,” advises a blog entry on inspiramarketing.com. “Selling tequila? Your mobile tour needs to hit somewhere big on Cinco de Mayo.”

Similarly, if your tour stops include college campuses, check their academic calendars to make sure students will be on campus during the proposed dates. Take into account that campuses start to empty a week ahead of a holiday such as spring break or winter break. Conversely, students’ spring break can be the perfect time to land a tour stop in a popular destination.

Local Culture

One of the opportunities presented by the roadshow format is the ability to increase the activation’s relevance at each stop by adapting to local cultural preferences, says a recent article. For example, “a food and beverage company can tailor their offerings to suit local tastes and preferences during a country-wide roadshow, strengthening their audience connection.” Researching each location early in the planning process allows time to uncover ways to appeal to consumers in each market.

Another way to build a brand’s association with local culture: Feature public figures popular among local residents, suggests bizzabo.com. “Attendees will appreciate that you and your team did the research to find out which speakers were from their area and made the conscious effort to include them within the speaker lineup.

Obtaining Permits

Working through individual municipalities’ code and permitting requirements is a necessary part of planning your roadshow, and the process of finding out what you need to do, and when, should begin as soon as locations are chosen.

Expert advice and the services of an experiential marketing agency can be hugely beneficial in this area. Aside from the hassle involved in securing the proper paperwork, there is the possibility that missing a step could force a midstream location change.

Design

Much of the hard work that goes into planning a roadshow is about logistics and budget, but there’s a fun, creative aspect too: designing the activation or pop-up.
The design process is about attracting, delighting, and engaging the target audience. It’s the point in the process where you and your ad/marketing team tap into what makes your brand unique — your values, inspirations, personality, look and feel — and interpret it in a way that will capture and hold the attention of your target audience.

Communicating everything that makes your brand special is likely impossible, but a roadshow is an opportunity to tell aspects of the brand’s story in a compelling way. Using the market research and personas, identify the brand attributes that matter most to the target audience and build an experience around them.

Consider the location, too: What will make your roadshow stand out on the landscape? What do people need, want, or do while they’re there? For a recent activation, Promobile helped ice cream brand Sunscoop and sunscreen brand Supergoop partner up for several summer-fun stops. The event needed a summery look and feel, so the team chose eye-catching vintage-style ice cream trucks to go with free samples of both ice cream and sunscreen.

Vehicle Selection

It’s a given that a mobile marketing experience involves a vehicle, but the type and number of vehicles you choose depends on the nature of the experience you want to create and the budget available to create it.

Most mobile activations are carried out by food trucks, vans, trailers, or buses wrapped with large vinyl decals representing the brand and the concept for the event. Branding a vehicle this way allows limitless creative options for the event, because swapping out the wrap is quick and easy. Brands sometimes design and build their own custom vehicles — e.g., the L.L. Bean bootmobile — but more often, they work with a marketing agency that has its own fleet of tour vehicles ready to be wrapped.

Footprint Design

Although the vehicle itself is important and ultimately the main attraction of a roadshow, the area around the vehicle matters, too. Oversized props, custom installations, even a cafe-like grouping of tables and chairs create a visual attraction and additional space for consumers to interact with the brand.

Consider adding interactive elements to the footprint area. This could include games, contests, or live cooking demonstrations that engage and entertain your audience. Interactive elements like these both attract passers-by and create memorable experiences that enhance brand engagement and encourage longer visits to your activation.

Two examples: For the food-truck-based Sunscoop/Supergoop activation, Promobile designed an exterior footprint that featured music, custom A-frames, and table displays. Ice cream brand Klondike launched a three-city tour that challenged consumers to show what they’d do for a Klondike bar. Samples were distributed from a branded ice cream truck, while participants completed group activities in a fun, interactive footprint dubbed “the challenge zone.”

Staffing

Including roadshow personnel as a design element might seem odd, but determining staffing numbers and roles is part of the experience design process. Roadshows, like other activations, are about building a connection between the brand and the target audience.

Much depends on what product or service the roadshow represents, but beyond tasking several individuals with truck operations and sampling-related interactions, you’ll also need a group of brand ambassadors and/or a street team to manage visitors, draw in passers-by, answer questions, and evangelize for the brand. In addition to hiring staff, you’ll need to train them, too. An experienced agency can help with the complex, time-consuming tasks of both hiring and training.

Promoting the Tour

Roadshows can travel almost anywhere, expanding brand recognition into cities and regions previously untouched by the brand’s experiential marketing efforts. But flexibility and range mean little and even the most fantastic experience falls flat if nobody shows up.

The solution? Use social media channels and existing marketing efforts to promote your tour and keep energy high throughout its duration.

“Your mobile tour should be coordinated with your social media campaigns and your email marketing, both of which can be extremely inexpensive while having a huge impact,” says an article on the Association of National Advertisers website.

Creating event pages and pinned posts on Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social media channels “is a great and efficient way to spread the word about your events,” notes an article on showplace.co.uk.

Create unique hashtags for the event, and use them in every social media post from before the tour to the very last stop. Personal care brand Dove made heavy use of the hashtag #BigPitEnergy to promote its roadshow to young women attending music venues. The campaign ultimately handed out some 167,500 samples of its deodorant to women in LA, NYC, and Gulf Shores, Ala.

Once the roadshow begins, share photos from every stop. Make it easy and appealing for attendees to do the same by using QR codes on any printed materials, the wrap on the vehicle, and any other surface that can be customized. Consider offering an incentive for attendees to like or follow the account, and to post user-generated content you can share to expand and extend the hype around your brand’s roadshow.

Promobile Marketing is a dynamic experiential marketing agency based in New York City. For over a decade, Promobile Marketing has collaborated with a range of brands—from budding startups to major CPG brands—on immersive marketing campaigns. Get in touch to discuss your next project.