BLOG

In experiential marketing events like brand activations, careful planning helps ensure the brand checks all the boxes when it comes to attracting the desired audience, delivering the right message, and creating a memorable experience that resonates with attendees. A solid plan provides a roadmap for success, ensuring that the activation builds brand awareness, lays the foundation for customer loyalty, and generates data the brand can use to shape future directions.

There’s a marketing adage that neatly sums up the distinction between a product and a brand: Companies make products, but consumers make brands. A product is something physical, tangible. An iPhone, a car, a pair of sneakers? All products. Apple, Subaru, Nike? Brands.

Just a few years ago, it looked like the heyday of the American shopping mall was long gone, and the challenges of the Covid era only sealed the fate of indoor shopping centers coast to coast. Bricks-and-mortar shopping, the basis of the shopping mall, has bounced back post-pandemic, with store openings outpacing closures. What does this mean for experiential marketing?

Signing on to sponsor an event used to be about writing a check to get your brand’s logo on a banner. That’s still a valid option, but increasingly, brands are recognizing that what consumers want and expect is connection. By taking sponsorship a step further, into real involvement with an event, brands can make connections that count with consumers.

Red Bull, Mountain Dew, Nike, Apple: These well-known brands exude energy, enthusiasm, innovation. In their marketing and advertising campaigns, they project a sense of adventure and promise thrilling experiences. These brands are what marketers call “excitement brands,” a designation that derives from the concept of “brand personality.”

Every brand, from multinational corporations to mom and pop boutiques, faces competition. Whether you’re a relative newcomer or a long-established brand, at some point real growth and market share can happen only by attracting competitors’ customers — and that requires persuading consumers to break their loyalty with your competitor and align with your brand. This is called “brand switching.”

Most discussions around measuring the effectiveness or success of these events are centered around measuring the impact of those experiences on brand loyalty, brand awareness, or brand image, not dollars and cents. But although measuring the financial impact of experiential marketing can be challenging, it's crucial to understanding its effectiveness.

While none of us can control the weather, local infrastructure, or the behavior of individual guests, we can control how we respond, and we can respond in ways that salvage the event — perhaps well enough that attendees won’t even notice.

Brands large and small also find that the Windy City is a great choice for brand activations and pop-ups, and the city’s major events and iconic destinations host numerous experiential events each year. Here are some examples of locations and events, plus case studies of successful activations in the Chicago area

Marketers have begun to shift focus away from activism for external causes and more toward the brand’s underlying purpose

One of the nation’s wealthiest metropolitan areas, Dallas is an excellent city for experiential marketing like brand activations and pop-up shops due to it's young and diverse population, thriving cultural scene, world-class venues, and many more.

Multi-day extravaganzas aren’t the only way to generate pop-up buzz and business for your brand. For smaller brands, online-only brands, or brands looking to test the pop-up waters for the first time, a single-day pop-up shop can be a great opportunity — and in some respects even a better opportunity than a longer-running storefront.