experiential marketing

experiential marketing

What is experiential marketing

Experiential marketing is a commercial concept of dramatizing a sales or service outlet that involves the user in staging the brand and its products or services. The purpose of this involvement of the customer is to generate in him emotions of well-being, which are supposed to facilitate the creation of a special relationship between the brand and him.



She joins event communication in her goal, and sensory marketing in her approach.

Experiential marketing seeks to create a universe by soliciting the five senses of the consumer (notion of customer experience), the goal being to make him live a unique moment, "it aims to differentiate an offer by associating it with an environment or a sensation". As a result, the consumer is plunged into hyperreality.

The differences between traditional and experiential marketing

Traditional marketing focuses on the attributes of the product and the benefits it provides to the consumer. Competition is mainly within narrowly defined product categories. In this type of marketing, the customer is expected to make a rational decision: he/she deals with the problem in an analytical way and engages in a series of thoughtful and reasoned actions.

In the case of experiential marketing, the relationship to the product is understood in terms of consumer activity. Here, the emotional overrides the functional. The proposed experience must be significant, memorable if not extraordinary: the five senses and emotion must be strongly solicited in an interaction between the customer and the environment (the products, but also the sellers, the places and different elements of decoration or furnishing).

It is no longer a question here of advancing technical characteristics, but of praised sensations, which would unconsciously be associated with a brand, a product. We no longer sell the product, but what it represents in terms of social belonging.

The first researcher to have developed the concept of experiential marketing in French-language marketing literature was Patrick Hetzel in 2002 in his book Planète Conso: expérientiel marketing et nouveaux universes de consommation. He developed founding concepts of this marketing trend, in particular its experiential wheel, which is often used in subsequent work.
The principles of experiential marketing

The principles of experiential marketing

Marketing professionals tend to think that the act of consuming loses interest over time for consumers, who would therefore be more and more demanding in terms of supply. Experiential marketing appears in this context, since it brings a new dimension to consumption, it takes place in the continuity of the adaptation of the offer to the needs and desires of the customer. According to Alain Decrop, the new consumer would have the characteristics of being hedonistic, narcissistic, unfaithful to the brand and in search of identity supports.

It is also a competitive weapon: brands need to differentiate themselves from each other and must now anticipate both the changing needs of consumers and the movements of competitors.

Experiential marketing is about three things: staging and appealing to the senses, experimenting and transforming the salesperson-customer relationship.

The dramatization of the space

The point of sale or service is staged to reflect the values it wants to convey. There is a multiplication of sensory signals (scenery, but also odours, sound atmosphere...) instituted so that the consumer who receives and interprets them with his own sensitivity. We are talking about a sensitive experience of consumption. The technical and advertising presentation of the product is no longer the desired goal, the place must rather present an atmosphere corresponding to the image to which we want to associate the product.

The aim is to provide a feeling of well-being for the visitor. It is a paradigmatic break with the traditional vision of consumption, where the consumer buys in the presence of a multitude of information that he sorts in a logical and coherent way in order to make an objective choice. In experiential marketing, the consumer will reduce this logical aspect to favour a subjective aspect, a purely hedonistic search for one's own identity, corresponding to the image conveyed by the brand or product

The call for experimentation

The premises are designed to allow people to spend time there, in particular through lounges, tasting areas, walking tours (for example, mandatory routes between entry and exit), etc. The customer no longer necessarily comes to buy, or even to get information, but to live a particular and sensitive experience.

The products are freely available, and can be used at will, but there are also sometimes elements that are not for sale (such as games, elements to see, touch, taste...) but which correspond to the positioning and image that the brand or product wishes to convey.
Experiential marketing induces strong consumer involvement.

Personalized contacts

The objective is for the seller-customer relationship to disappear and give way to a consumer experience where the user is closer to more than one experimenter, and the merchant to an advisor.

The experience of consumption

According to sociologists, the consumer experience would bias the consumer's vision by focusing mainly on the social context in which the individual is situated in relation to the market. Thus he would only perceive what he would like to perceive without having an objective vision of the experience itself.

The marketing of the experience is not only focused on the moment of the act of purchase, the experience also takes place before and after the act of purchase, and also outside the point of sale. There is both the desire, the imagination of the experience before it takes place; and also the experience as it is lived after the purchase, where the customer tries to reclaim the sensations felt at the point of sale.

Many specialists denounce the various forms of experiential marketing that derive from their original function to drive unnecessary and compulsive purchases.

Immersion theory

Immersion is the appropriation of an experience through steps, landmarks. The visitor must always feel in control of himself, it is a question of leaving him free, and of attracting his attention, his curiosity: it is a question of encouraging him to explore the environment created for him. In fact, it goes by itself to the different products.

The theory of appropriation

The concept of appropriation is a concept derived from the social sciences. These forces, ins and outs have been successively studied in psychology, sociology and marketing.
This concept encompasses two aspects:

A praxéological dimension: Appropriation is built by the consumer's action, by his physical and psychological involvement. He appreciates the consumer experience through his five senses. This requires creating an experience that allows interaction, but also exploration and physical discovery. It is important that the experience allows for transformation. Psychological elements allow the consumer to appropriate the experience and give it meaning.
Recursive approach: Ownership participates and is the result of the process of self-building. In psychosociology, as in marketing, the appropriate object is defined as a medium for self-expression.