Experiential Marketing Some Examples

Marketeers are never short of new buzzwords and one of the twists that come out in recent times is experiential marketing.Experiential Marketing is in a way an extension of consumer oriented marketing.Experiential Marketing uses brand relevant experiences to appeal to both the rational and emotional buying triggers of the intended audience.
The idea of experiential marketing reflects a right brain bias because it is about fulfilling consumers’ aspirations to experience certain feelings – comfort and pleasure on one hand, and avoidance of discomfort and displeasure on the other.
In contrast, traditional product centric marketing reflects a left brain bias because it generally seeks to persuade consumers by invoking rational factors that position the advertised brand as better than competing brands. Product centric marketing presumes a degree of rationality in consumers’ decision-making that contemporary brain science refutes. Consumers’ decisions are much more influenced by emotionally generated feelings than by their rationally derived thought.More here
An example of Experiential Marketing is Mahindra in India, Mahindra Tractors wanted to launch their Hy Tec brand which was a strong hydraulic tractor aiming to help farmers saw the field.
To show this technology to the farmers they engaged them through a technique in which sensors were fixed to the hydraulic and a large LCD monitor was placed for the farmers, which captured the movement of the cultivator on an ECG graph. This activity was easily understood and remembered by the farmers and the sales graph was tremendously increased
Experiential Marketing can be easily be combined with Word of Mouth Marketing and affects can be astounding .An experiential approach to launch a brand may be more effective and relevant than anything that television advertisements can offer. One of the best example is Absolut vodka. In Australia, Absolut Vodka launched a brand called “Cut”, through a strictly experiential marketing point of view. Using public relations, point-of-sale, online and event marketing, Absolut was able to eschew traditional advertising altogether, something unheard of when launching a spirits brand.
In a rather astounding bow to experiential marketing over mass marketing, Absolut leased two bars in Sydney and Melbourne, put on DJ sets, band concerts and photo exhibitions in these spaces. Visitors to the Absolut Cut bars got a free bottle of Cut, and consumers were given a chance to contribute their photos to the exhibits, generating what Absolut hoped would be a viral element to the campaign. The campaign flew in the face of traditional ways to launch a brand. Instead of using mass marketing to blanket the millions in order to reach the few, Absolut chose to target the few to eventually reach the masses.
Hindustan Times has a nice article which has more examples on Experiential Marketing