Experiential Marketing by Shirra Smilan highlights a shift in marketing towards two-way communication with prospects. The author shares trends such as the following:

“When used on a large scale, traditional advertising can have a low cost per thousand, but overall it can be a very expensive tool, one traditionally effective for market-leading brands that can afford to run very large-scale awareness campaigns. However, since the rise of programmatic, digital advertising, and the ability for laser-sharp targeting and personalisation, this is changing…Facebook provides such such audience-targeting options that it is often a great tool for driving localised event registrations using its geo-targeting capabilities, and can prove extremely lucrative in marketing strategy.”

Understanding these trends, the book progresses to share strategies to adapt and leverage them including connecting authentically in a way that adds value to the consumer’s life.

”Two-way communication and interactive engagement are the keys to creating memorable experiences that drive word of mouth, and transform consumers (and trade/ media/ employees/ other stakeholders) into brand advocates and brand evangelists.”

Up to this point, I found the book insightful and agreed with the new approach to marketing. Regularly, in our marketing consultancy, we are seeing these changes coming into play and the success of personalised experiences and brand advocates as well as social media.

The book then moves onto explain the tactics to execute experiential marketing and this is where I battled with it. The suggestions are designed for large companies with accompanying large budgets. Reading with my small to medium sized, entrepreneurial clients in mind, I can’t see putting this plans into actions. About 50% of the book is dedicated to explaining, in step-by-step form, how to creating amazing experiential marketing.

The book is well-written, and if your budgets allow, this book may be a great read for you. For me, it’s a three out of five on the en-JOY-ment scale, I enjoyed the trending and fresh approach but it lacked in application for me.

One of the current buzzwords in marketing is experiential marketing – something that always makes me misread it as experimental marketing for some reason – namely the practice of helping consumers experience and engage with a brand. So this is a book, as you may expect, about that subject, and a revised edition at that!

It is billed as being a ‘practical guide to interactive brand experiences’ and, to be fair, it seems to do what it sets out to be. You will either get on-side with it straight away or you won’t: it feels a bit of an either-or proposition, through no direct fault of the book or its contents.

The author has sought to show the ropes of experiential marketing and gives guidance about generating an amplified level of brand engagement through a hyper-niche of engaged consumers, pushing social media activity and generating buzz. Not every company may have operations to benefit from this kind of action, but arguably some of the techniques could be used, even in part, by all companies to help their marketing and promotions efforts. The reader is aided by a methodological look at the subject with engaging content to help get you doing something rather than just reading about it.

It is priced at a reasonable level so you can easily afford to buy it to familiarise yourself with possibly an unfamiliar concept and the potential reward is much greater. One of the key activities of this marketing methodology is the ‘live event’ and this can be a broad definition, so even a webinar or information presentation can be used. Not everything has to be informal or ultra-consumer focussed. Yes, even a webinar about tax planning legislation could be engaging in the right hands and with the right audience.

Unfortunately, I feel that this book initially expected a certain degree of pre-knowledge and the start of the book was a bit of a mixed, confusing array of information that could bewilder many potential readers. It did get better as you progressed, however, so be prepared for a little bit of possible extra reading scrutiny at the start, but the overall message is worth any reading pains that may exist. It is good that there are summaries at the end of chapters as well as references to additional reading sources – these can be incredibly valuable!

It can be worthwhile looking at this book and seeing if your company can benefit from this marketing approach.

Experiential Marketing, written by Shirra Smilansky and published by Kogan Page. ISBN 9780749480967. YYYY