Experiential marketing: Trying it out

Trying out some experiential marketing can attract customers into your pub and drive sales. Why not test out some different initiatives? By Adam Withrington.

Here are two words to make you want to run away, crawl under a rock and shudder with fear: "experiential marketing". It is one of those phrases you would normally associate with advertising executives with dangerous ties and too much time on their hands.

But wait. Give experiential marketing a chance - if you use it correctly it can help you make more of your drinks offer.

It is a form of marketing that has been picked up with great interest by brand owners. And the benefits for pub business should make licensees sit up and take notice.

Fuller's, for example, is having great success across its pub estate with various forms of experiential marketing.

It supplies licensees with chalkboards which encourage customers to come in for a free sample of a Fuller's beer. The Chiswick-based brewer is also using tasting trays with four half-pints for £5, encouraging customers to taste the Fuller's range.

David Spencer, brands marketing manager at London brewer Fuller's, says: "Experiential marketing brings the brand to life in a way that other forms of marketing would struggle to and introduces a human element to it. It is a great way of building trust between a brand and its consumer."

Drinks company Pernod Ricard is also a strong believer in the power of experiential marketing. Across its wide portfolio of brands the company uses sampling and matches its brands with consumer experiences - such as Jacob's Creek at Wimbledon, Havana Club at the Cuban Music Awards, Jameson whiskey with Xfm radio party nights and Chivas Regal with exclusive poker nights.

Indeed the company has now appointed its communications manager, Illy Jaffar, to head up a new experiential marketing team.

Marketing company iD commissioned some research among its clients to try and understand the importance of experiential marketing. It found that 68 per cent of marketers (both inside and outside the drinks industry) were already spending more on experiential marketing in 2005 than they had in the whole of 2004.

And the amount brand owners use experiential marketing is going to keep on increasing, according to Kevin McQuillan, Interbrew UK's sponsorship manager for England and Wales.

"I think that if the amount that companies spend on experiential marketing continues to bear fruit and deliver the kind of results that the company is driving for, then there is absolutely no reason to expect anything other than continued increased spending on experiential marketing by those same companies and by others wishing to emulate those results for their own brands," argues Kevin.

Why is this trend developing? ​

There is no doubt that the increasing restrictions being placed on advertisers by regulatory bodies are having an effect on what they can do with advertising.

However, according to iD, the more important fact is that customers are increasingly media savvy. They can see through a lot of the advertising that appears on TV and in print. You could almost say there is overkill in the market these days. There are just too many adverts for consumers to get their heads around and they now need and want something a lot more personal than just a message. They want to get a tangible experience of the brand.

Consumer research carried out by research company MyVoice for iD last year backs this up:

• Sixty-one per cent of consumers felt there were so many adverts around that they no longer took any notice of them
• Ninety-seven per cent said that retail staff's ability to answer specific product questions was important
• Eighty-nine per cent said they wanted to try out products before they bought them
• Sixty-four per cent said experiential marketing was effective at making brands memorable.

What this demonstrates is how crucially important experiential marketing can be to you. The bottom line is it can help you make more money.

But it entirely depends on you showing creativity and looking for sales opportunities. You don't necessarily have to show any loyalty to brands - the point is to take the idea of experiential marketing and use it to your own advantage.

If you don't believe me then let's look at experiential marketing in its most simple format - "try before you buy".

Here are two case studies, one from a brand owner and the other from a licensee.

• Licensee:​ Frank Cobb, the Shipwrights, Padstow, Cornwall

Frank and his wife Gail won the St Austell Managed House Cask Ale Pub of the Year award in 2004 for the success they had spreading the word on cask beer.

"As a company St Austell encourages its licensees to use 'try before you buy' with its cask beers," says Frank. "When a customer comes in, wanting a beer but not sure which to have, I put three tasting glasses in front of them and go through our range with them. "I give the customer a taste of each one and also take them through the provenance of each beer. What we lose in free samples is nothing compared to the amount of sales it gives us.

"I have just done a stock-take for the last 45 days and it showed we sold about 5,600 pints of the three main St Austell brands Tribute, Tinners and HSD. We gave away 40 pints in free samples. I mean, that is just a drop in the ocean in comparison."

Brand:​ Heineken

Last month Heineken announced it was embarking on a major sampling campaign, taking customers on board a branded battle bus to try a "Pepsi challenge" style taste test between Heineken and premium lager category leader Stella Artois.

Chris Duffy, customer marketing controller for Heineken, says: "The campaign is going really well. The initial research showed that 64 per cent of consumers would prefer Heineken to Stella. The reality is closer to 69 per cent. We have got out to over 10,500 consumers and have had an amazing response.

"Try before you buy is a really effective way of changing people's perception of your brand. And that is the challenge we have got, considering where Heineken has come from in the last three years, changing from a 3.4 per cent lager to the premium five per cent. Realising that you prefer the taste of one product over another is an enormously powerful marketing tool as it is a very engaging way of communicating with the consumer."

"And it can work well for licensees in an outlet," he continues. "One of the big issues is driving value and to solve this you can get customers to trade up to a beer that might be 20p to 30p more expensive. And there are always barriers to people trying new products. Offering 'try before you buy' is one way of breaking down those barriers."

What is experiential marketing?​

Marketing company iD defines it as "a live interaction between a brand and a consumer that is sensitive to the brand's values, impactful, memorable and capable of generating a lasting positive relationship".

In other words it is a direct, tangible form of marketing. So it is nothing to do with poster or TV advertising campaigns. Rather, experiential marketing is about creating an experience for the customer.

It can take many forms, from sampling the product before you buy it, or taking that a step further and sampling it in a specially created environment - for example, sampling Foster's lager at a special Foster's barbecue night.