How To Know What Your Brand Experience Is Worth

Experiential brand marketing, promoting a brand by providing a pleasing experience for consumers, never goes out of style. It can range from simple and commonplace forms such as food sampling at a supermarket or an auto test drives to schemes as elaborate and costly as private brunches for Samsung Galaxy owners and the ultimate brand experience of the moment, Pokémon GO. Small scale or grand, it always costs something to create these experiences, so measuring returns should be part of the mix.

In principle, measuring return on experience isn’t all that complicated. Define the goals at the start of the marketing campaign, set success criteria, execute the campaign, measure and assess results. Simple, right? Well, no, of course not.

The first, and biggest, barrier to measuring returns of any marketing effort is the reluctance of many marketers to define goals in the first place. At one level, it’s ridiculous. Why invest without a clear understanding of what you hope to accomplish? But at many companies, marketing management turns over quickly. If you fear your jobs at risk all the time, you may hesitate to commit to any specific goals at all, because failing to reach one may become one more excuse to fire you. I’m not unsympathetic to the marketer’s plight, but failure to define goals and success criteria still leads to a lot of wasted marketing expense.

Success criteria need to fit the campaign. Choose specific, measurable success criteria that the marketing team can realistically influence. A marketing executive once came to me looking for help to understand the connection between her campaigns and the company-specific performance indexes that formed the basis for her compensation. The indexes were vaguely defines mixes of customer survey results, corporate financial performance, and other factors. At best, the marketer could only influence those things indirectly. More appropriate criteria might have included things such as product inquiries, event attendance, and social media or press mentions.

Committing to goals and measurement does more than give you a way to decide whether a campaign is a success or not. It actually helps you succeed, because it’s a lot easier to be a marketing success when you have a clear idea of what you’re trying to achieve.

With your goal in mind, you’re positioned to do the consumer research needed to plan and execute events that are in line with your goals. After all, you’re not just putting on a great party, you’re building a brand.

I once attended a brand experience event that seemed ideal for its lingerie brand sponsor. It was a big party, complete with music, cocktails, low-fat treats and the big attractions of the afternoon: a professional bra fitting and a free bra. Thousands of women packed into a huge hall for the party, taking numbers and enthusiastically waiting for their turns in the fitting rooms. And what an opportunity for the brand. Women spend $16 billion on bras each year, and when we find one that we like, we buy several.

But the organizers didn’t seem to think the event through. Many women found few sample bras in their size. If they couldn’t find something that fit well and looked nice at that brapalooza, they certainly weren’t going to follow up by going to a store and looking for more of the same. What a terrible waste of money for the brand.

How can you measure the value of your brand experience? The same way you measure the value of any other marketing campaign. Define specific, measurable goals, set success criteria and make the commitment to follow through.