“Vision without execution is just hallucination!”
Potential customers and especially digital natives are looking for genuine brand experiences that suit their lifestyle. You create real experiences with your brand that trigger and stimulate interest, trial, and loyalty. These experiences are the perfect occasion to prove the carefully-built brand claims of your campaigns and convert them into sales. Brand activation expects you to know your audience. The brand experience must be right, or the consumer will walk away, just as they zap away from TV commercials without blinking an eye. Therefore, it's important to start brand activation only having completed the strategic work in which you define buyer persona profiles and others. You'll get to know your customers, their interests, motivations, and needs. Define who you want to reach and how.
Events, experience marketing, and interaction via social media can play an important role in brand activation, but don’t forget your point of sale! Recent research by Philips Lighting demonstrated that in DIY, 70% (!) of shoppers decide which brand and product to buy when they're actually in store. Good old POS material and all other shopper-marketing tools, such as shelf design, are far from outdated.
A successful brand-activation campaign integrates a range of media and communication tools creatively and intelligently. As a brand, you stimulate the consumer’s interest and loyalty. The direct and indirect interaction with the consumer will also help you to continue fine-tuning and optimising your future actions.
