A study by The Nielsen Company highlights that women complain that brands don’t understand them. Brands forget that consumers are constantly evolving and the brand also needs to evolve with them. How many women aren’t fond of the Dove campaign which embraces ‘Real Women’? Or even L’oreal who switched their tagline to “because you’re worth it”?

To effectively engage with women, brands need to look at marketing as networking – finding friendships that matter. Hotcow’s latest research has validated our long term thinking that ‘normal really is boring’ with a massive 71% of people saying that their attention must be grabbed to have any chance of me (consumer) recognising you (brand) or wanting to learn about you (brand). Marketeers don’t believe that their brand is ‘normal’ so why create communication that is perceived as ordinary? Brands who turn ordinary on its head and make it relevant to them will be winning the pounds from the purse.

An advert created by Microsoft Digital Advertiser Solutions in 2007 perfectly demonstrates in a humorous way the challenge for brands to connect with the female consumer. No matter how well-intentioned the marketer is, he is failing to engage with women. As the video demonstrates, the days of creating imagery and messages to be pushed onto women are gone. Female consumers are looking for genuine relationships. They have changed and expect brands to adapt to these changes and listen to what they have to say.

Women stay with brands that meet their needs and exceed their expectations. They have a much stronger stimulus to notice the appearance of things, but what brands need to bear in mind is that wowing female consumers with an outstanding campaign is not enough. They need fresh, personal messages and stories they can relate to. P&G’s campaign for the London 2012 Olympics is a perfect example of a heart-warming message, playing on the role of the ‘dedicated mother’ to push their power brands to women across the world.

Whilst word of mouth is a major driver of purchase decisions amongst women, they are making their needs, desires and interests known by shifting the culture of consumerism itself. Women are natural communicators. They love telling other women about things that have made their lives easier, cheap bargains and great new products and services that they have discovered. They are very active on social networks. It is no surprise that women make up 82% of active users on the fast growing social network website Pinterest, and why women commonly forward the latest Groupon deals to their friends, and head for a spot of sale-shopping together.

Fortunately, today it is easier than ever to monitor online conversations. The challenge for brands lies in truly connecting with them and building a relationship based on trust. The majority of Hotcow’s work shares one thing in common – it is targeted at women. We are experts in creating connections, capturing content and building ongoing conversations with female audiences of all kinds. To successfully connect with female consumers, building eye-catching campaigns goes a long way to interrupting people, but this is no longer enough to create engagement. Brands need to demonstrate what they will do to make a difference to their lives.

From the experiential standpoint, when interacting with your brand through a personal experience, the consumer begins to see where, and how, you can make a positive change to their lives. This is when you start building a ‘genuine’ relationship with them.

Check out Hotcow’s website for more thoughts on this subject.

Hotcow is a multi-award winning Experiential Marketing agency. We get brands in front of consumers in ways that persuade them to buy. We fully implement our ideas; nothing needs to be farmed out. For more information or free consultation, contact us.

Grant Leboff, who coined the term ‘Sticky Marketing’, outlines a new model of customer engagement that requires companies to focus on “what your marketing can do for your customer, rather than what your marketing can do for your brand”. Creating a ‘sticky’ message means that you are gaining consumers attention and helping to keep them engaged over a longer term.

In today’s world, offering a great customer experience is extremely important to retain consumers and earn their appreciation and support. However, companies are required to offer them progressive levels of convenience, speed and support, which can result in a rise in the level of consumers expectations. Additionally, within the intensively competitive and cluttered marketplace, it is essential for brands to gain real insight into how consumers are most likely to take notice and remember their brand. Mapping the consumer journey becomes critical if you want to get consumers attention and create a positive impact on your brand.

Consumers are becoming ever more active in engaging in brand messaging across their channels of relevance, especially if it is a fun and enjoyable experience. With the myriad of choices available in the market today, consumers are obliged to choose the brands that deliver what they expect. Therefore, to secure the best ‘return of engagement’ from your consumers, you should aim to offer them a good experience with your brand to keep them coming back.

The most powerful way to create a remarkable experience with your brand is to tap directly into consumer’s emotions and show them support at every stage of their interaction with your brand. A great marketing message that sticks should be something that people can connect to at all possible customer touchpoints. However, developing a compelling brand experience in which different touchpoints interconnect requires innovation and creativity. These elements demand strong attention to detail if you want to foster positive experiences across all channels and attract consumers to your brand.

Experiential marketing is the perfect mechanism to create the Bubble Gum Effect for your brand. By offering consumers a real experience with your brand, you will be able to engage their senses and emotions whilst providing information and support. What’s more, social media has also added a new dimension in terms of how consumers acquire and digest information. By using it in support of your experiential activity you can enrich the consumer interaction with your brand.

Ultimately, the challenge for brands lies in identifying the best ways to engage and disseminate value across multiple channels and devices in order to win the consumer purchase choice and ensure they keep coming back .

Check out Hotcow’s website for more information on the ways you can make your message stick and create the Bubble Gum Effect for your brand.

A lot of us agree that Experiential is still a misunderstood marketing discipline. Marketers know that it is vital to engage with their consumers but often don’t understand the real capabilities of experiential marketing. Additionally, the proliferation of new media elicits an information flow in different directions, and therefore brands need to work harder than ever to deliver the right information in an original and compelling way.

In today’s dynamic marketplace, the old one-size-fits-all approach has given way to a new understanding of precision marketing and the importance of having a two-way communications link with consumers. Consumers demand a more personalised access to information; they value brands that cleverly approach them with a personal experience, and balancing all the elements of an integrated multichannel campaign can become a complex challenge.

There’s no doubt that experiential marketing can create an invaluable brand experience with your consumers on a one-to-one level. When you give people a meaningful experience with your brand, you are making your product or service more relevant to your target group. At this point, people begin to understand the value of your product and service and, thus, believe in your brand.

Experiential can push your brand through the sales pipeline much quicker than other channels, however, the successful combination of traditional advertising, PR and digital strategies will have a cumulative effect on consumer recall. Here at Hotcow, we developed a bespoke planning model to simplify the strategic phase, helping us to come up with unique and innovative concepts to fit your brand’s marketing, PR and/or business goals. Ultimately, the key about experiential campaigns is in understanding the different stages of the consumer decision journey and grasping the right experiential approach to achieve your overall marketing objective.

Whether or not the Olympics will leave a legacy for the sector? For a multicultural crowd such as the Olympics, it is important to know how to make the right choices to suit your brand. With the strict measures to protect official sponsors and the increase on location costs, brands need to be realistic about their expectations and realise that the cluttered arenas might not be the best opportunity to engage with their target audience.

As for the legacy, back in the 70s, the visionary Alvin Toffler talked about the upcoming ‘Experiential Industry’, which Joseph Pine and James Gilmore then extended upon in their book ‘The Experience Economy’. Consumers are becoming reluctant to advertising messages and when brands and marketing agencies finally understand the industry as whole, and accept that specialist experiential agencies will deliver a more accurate and tailored service with a clear overall vision, they will be more likely to succeed in this new marketing era and truly engage their consumers with their brand.

Check our Hotcow’s website for more thoughts on this subject.

A global social media study by InSites Consulting revealed that 44% of consumers are seeking a more engaging level of participation in product launches and campaigns. Rather than selling a standardised desirable lifestyle, brands have a responsibility to fulfil consumers expectations with a caring and personalised approach, whilst predicting the future desires of consumers in both an online and offline environment.

As Trendwatching highlighted, “serving is the new selling”. With the ever increasing proliferation of information available online, brands should go that extra mile to appease their savvy, well informed consumers. The importance of considering “time, convenience, control and independence” when deciding the most accurate methods of communication with consumers is paramount to offer them a sprinkling of Brand Butlering. But how can you enhance your ‘butlering’ skills to meet your consumer’s needs?

Consumers are not only time-poor, but they also desire instant gratification. Experiential marketing is a perfect mechanism to approach consumers with unexpected brand services, allowing you to deliver a more added value and relevance in your service offerings. One great example is Veet’s ‘Pamper Lounge’, which Hotcow created to indulge Veet’s customers during Christmas shopping last December. Once a Veet product had been purchased, the shopped-out customer was treated to a free relaxing beauty treatment and entered into a competition to win 2 VIP tickets to Vodaphone’s London Fashion Weekend. This campaign not only preempted the needs and desires of tired and weary shoppers, but also surprise them with an unexpected experience that they won’t forget.

Mobile apps are a further platform for brands to leverage their services towards consumer lifestyles, digitally servicing their every need. With the plethora of options available to enhance users experiences with practical and convenient apps, there are infinite opportunities for mobile integration within your experiential marketing campaigns. Vodafone’s ‘London’s Calling’ experiential campaign is another example of a convenient branded service used to enhance consumer lifestyles. Passengers are not only given the chance to charge their phones on the branded taxi, but they can also pay for their journey via a simple smartphone app. This example proves that functionality, time-saving and intuition in regards to the needs of consumers are the perfect ingredients to Vodafone’s Brand Butler success.

What do you think? Which Brand Butler tools and services does your company offer to service the needs and desires of your consumers?

Check out our website for more information on experiential marketing tools you can use to enhance your brand ‘butlering’ skills.

As a brand engagement agency, it is our job to understand how consumers act and react to brands. It is all about having a cognitive and affective commitment to nurturing a mutual and active relationship with consumers. But what exactly does this mean? How do we do it? Is it measurable? Is it real? Why is it so difficult for marketers to grasp the meaning of brand engagement?

Well, Mitchell is right; engagement is one of the most overused and misunderstood words in marketing. We keep finding many different interpretations and conflicting ways of measuring the level of engagement with consumers, which ultimately make brands struggle to understand the process behind it.

Last year McKinsey revealed that we had entered in a ‘new era of engagement’, and brands should be attentive to some guiding principles to reach consumers at every stage of the consumer decision journey. Relating to consumers and end users requires an in-depth knowledge of their habits and desires, throughout the entire decision journey. This is absolutely crucial if you want to effectively engage your consumers with your brand.

As Mitchell pointed out “while brands want more engagement with customers, not every customer wants to engage with every brand”. With the proliferation of channels and devices available, customers may actually come close to brands hundreds of times via multiple touch-points. And the fact is, if you are not nurturing a personal and respectful relationship with your consumers across different platforms, you will face the risk of loosing or disengaging them.

In our website, we discuss that the best form of engagement is making your brand memorable by proactively reaching out to your consumers through personalised, two-way communications. When making it real, you are basically reaffirming your brand’s value and your mutually-respectful relationship: I’m here to meet your needs and expectations, by showing how you (customer) are important to me (brand)! This ultimately has a strong impact on customer decision-making and real engagement with your brand.

The outcome for the engagement definition debacle is simple: before investing your time and budget in the wrong channels, you need to ask yourself: Who am I trying to engage? What will truly engage my audience? And more importantly, why should my audience care?

These days, real brands are more valuable than ever. On the other hand, brands that lack meaning and differentiation are punished. By following these questions as gospel, you will be able to determine the ideal brand offerings necessary to satisfy your consumers every expectation.

What do you think? Check out our website for more of our thoughts on this subject.

In our blog, we discuss why experiential marketing is a fantastic tool for bringing your brand’s story to life and at the same time, producing great content. By adding a real touch to your campaign, you can engage your audience personally by telling your brand’s story through a great experience that consumers will remember, which can always be amplified with social media efforts to reach a wider audience.

We’ve been seeing great examples of experiential storytelling, which have resulted in the production of brilliant emotional campaigns, shared by millions of people throughout social networks. Hotcow’s favourites are the Coca-Cola ‘Where will happiness strike next?’, surprising unsuspecting consumers in a variety of locations, including Rio de Janeiro, Kenya and Mongolia to name a few, with a combination of live event sampling, prize giving and a gaming element; and the Tropicana’s ‘Brighter Mornings for Brighter Days’ campaign, providing residents of a remote town in the Canadian Arctic with an artificial sun for one month of their winter.

The goal of brand storytelling is to transition the consumer from awareness towards trial and advocacy. Ultimately, a strong conceptual plan combined with storytelling and live consumer experiences are excellent mechanisms to move consumers through the ranks and change brand perception for the better.

What is your brand story? Read our blog post ‘How can you use storytelling to sell your brand?’ and find out the best ways of integrating a strong branded story throughout your marketing efforts.

As we discuss in our blog, thinking outside the box is paramount for encouraging consumer interaction. Live brand experiences require specialist experiential skills, which demands knowledge and understanding of the strategies that are most likely to engage your consumers, as well as a large sprinkling of creativity to invite and encourage them to interact with your brand.

Experiential marketing recognises the importance of rational and emotional consumer attributes, which make pleasurable experiences pertinent. Here at Hotcow, we specialise in live, creative experiential events which make brands shine, engaging consumers through captivating and unforgettable personalised experiences. We love to think outside the box and create a truly unique ‘wow’ factor, which stops consumers in their tracks.

In our experience, when planning a unique live marketing activity, there are certain essential factors that require consideration. Firstly, the accurate and precise identification of your target consumer base is extremely important. Additionally, experiential specialists must understand how consumers interact with brands and what they are looking for in terms of an experience in a dynamic environment. Every interaction should be viewed as an opportunity to create meaningful two-way conversations with your consumers and, ultimately, the overall campaign must be representative of both the brand and target market.

Read our blog post about The importance of creativity and out-of-the-box thinking in a live marketing environment to discover the creative tactics that you can use to enhance your live marketing campaign.

Sally Durcan
MD, Hotcow Experiential Marketing Agency
www.hotcow.co.uk
@hotcow

Hotcow is a multi-award winning brand engagement agency specialising in experiential marketing. Our mission is simple: to help brands understand the power of “experience-based marketing” and offer expertise in how to develop, plan and execute campaigns in the right way to get the right results. For more information or a free consultation contact us.

Free samples result in a 90% increase in brand awareness, as well as a 91% increase in likelihood to purchase. This was highlighted in one of our Celebrating Creativity blogs of Coca-Cola’s ‘Where will happiness strike next’ experiential campaign. After all, bringing a smile to the faces of not only those lucky enough to witness the iconic sampling campaign firsthand, but also to over 3 million Youtube viewers will without a doubt drive awareness and purchase intent.

Our own research with members of the FMCG community on LinkedIn has further revealed great levels of support for sampling, describing it as a ‘key factor’ that ‘directly drives uptake from the stores’, ‘provides an avenue to get good consumer feedback’ and as ‘critical to establish an emotional link with the brand’.

We strongly support the integration of experiential sampling tactics within the rest of the marketing mix; and it is clear that experiential is beginning to be recognised as an indispensable element. Experiential is proven to be the most successful method of creating two-way interactions and emotional connections, driving trust, purchases and peer to peer recommendations.

We highly recommend that brands chose experiential specialists to integrate the most appropriate elements of the marketing mix for each specific campaign. Here at Hotcow, we are equipped with the expert know-how, experience and logistic skills to execute your sampling campaign to best effect.

Sally Durcan
MD, Hotcow Experiential Marketing Agency
www.hotcow.co.uk
@hotcow

The economic downturn undoubtedly resulted in more economically responsible consumption. However, despite this, research has shown that consumer decision making is not always rational. Consumers seek satisfaction through consumption, and increasingly enjoy sharing their purchasing experiences on social media platforms. Subsequently, consumer discussions in regards to brands and products has a great peer to peer impact on purchasing decisions.

Mobile technology is a further addition to the shopping experience, with branded apps being created for brands to offer exciting in store discounts and promotions. These mobile efforts, though, need to be well placed within your overall communications plan in order to be a successful method of promotion.

At Hotcow we are always talking about how experiential marketing can develop a great insight into consumer behaviour. When enticing consumers into making a purchasing decision, a combination of multi-sensory and experiential strategies will certainly foster an emotional connection with your brand.

This is discussed further in another recent blog post Key Trends in Experiential Marketing that affects consumer behaviour. Consumers look for entertainment, engagement and relevant offers from brands when they are out shopping. This exemplifies the increasing importance of providing the right information and experiences, using experiential to get to know consumers better and to encourage two way conversations.

By offering product trials and testing options, you can help to trigger desire for your brand. This is particularly beneficial when implemented at the point-of-sale, to enrich consumer’s shopping experiences.

What do you think? Check out our top five tips to create memorable shopping experiences for your consumers and let us know your thoughts! Tweet @Hotcow.

Sally Durcan
MD, Hotcow Experiential Marketing Agency
www.hotcow.co.uk
@hotcow

As we discuss on our blog, brands that “stand out” and “get chosen” are the ones that speak volumes to their audiences. In fact, when people are rushing through their daily commute, they are rarely paying attention to advertising messages on billboards or on the floor. Hence, as new channels of communication emerge from ever evolving digital technologies, brands need to find new ways to grab the attention of consumers and get their message across.

The challenge for marketers here is to create new strategies to reach the consumer on a more personal level, engaging people in ways that they find to be informative and entertaining. Through an exciting and unique approach, experiential activities can create greater brand visibility when people are on the move, helping you to get your brand’s message across in the most innovative of ways.

Hotcow’s experiential campaign for Powwownow exemplifies this perfectly. With three celebrities participating in a 24 hour conference call whilst lounging on beds in the centre of major London stations, commuters couldn’t help but take a look. This demonstrates the attention-grabbing nature of experiential marketing, bombarding consumers’ usually mundane commute to work.

What are your thoughts? Do you agree that traditional media is less effective these days? Tweet us @Hotcow.

Flavia Giardino
Social Media & PR Executive, Hotcow Experiential Marketing Agency
www.hotcow.co.uk
@hotcow