Book summary “Experiential marketing”: summary

Introduction

Traditional features-and-benefits marketing no longer works in a crowded marketplace where functional product differences disappear overnight. You face demanding customers who view products simply as platforms for sensory, emotional, and relational engagement.

Traditional features-and-benefits marketing is dead, and modern companies must instead stage holistic customer experiences that appeal to the senses, emotions, intellect, physical behaviors, and social identities.

Bernd Schmitt explains how to transition from traditional methods to the Experience Economy by deploying a structured framework of strategic modules and tactical tools. You will learn how to design sensory, emotional, cognitive, behavioral, and social encounters that transform ordinary consumption into memorable experiences.

• How do you shift your focus from product features to holistic customer experiences?
• Which tactical tools bring sensory and emotional marketing to life?
• How do you organize your company to sustain continuous experiential innovation?

1. From Features and Benefits to Customer Experiences

Three simultaneous developments signal an entirely new approach to marketing. You face the omnipresence of information technology, the supremacy of the brand, and the ubiquity of communications and entertainment. Razorfish noted that everything digital will be digital. Richard Branson expanded Virgin into soft drinks, records, trains, airlines, and toiletries under one brand label.

Economic value progresses through four distinct stages: commodities, goods, services, and experiences. As services and goods become increasingly commoditized, you must shift from selling basic offerings to staging memorable experiences that command higher economic value.

Economic value has progressed from commodities to goods, services, and now experiences, requiring you to abandon narrow feature-driven marketing.

Coffee sold as a commodity costs $1 per pound. As a packaged product it is pennies a cup. In a coffee shop it is up to a dollar, and at Starbucks it sells for several dollars per cup.

Traditional marketing is built on four key characteristics that focus narrowly on functional features and benefits, narrow product categories, rational decision-making consumers, and analytical methodologies. Procter & Gamble differentiates its nine laundry detergent brands like Tide, Cheer, and Ivory Snow based strictly on specific functional benefits sought by customers.

The Experience Economy

Experiential marketing differs from traditional marketing by focusing on customer experiences, examining broad consumption situations, treating customers as rational and emotional animals, and using eclectic methodologies. Ikea displays furniture and accessories as part of consumption situations in its stores and brochures to create an imaginary lifestyle for the customer. In 1998, Ikea had 140 stores across 29 countries, with an estimated capitalization of 100bn SKr, or approximately 12.4bn USD according to Stellan Bjoerg.

You broaden market opportunities by moving over to widen product categories and moving up to examine consumption situations in a broader sociocultural context. Instead of competing only against Burger King and Wendy's, McDonald's is viewed as competing against Friendly's, Denny's, Starbucks, and any other quick bite or hangout.

Redefining Branding

While traditional branding treats a brand merely as a static identifier of ownership and quality, experiential branding views a brand as a provider of holistic customer experiences. The traditional equation Brand equals ID fails to capture the rich sensory, affective, and cognitive associations required by modern consumers, necessitating the shift to Brand equals EX. Coca-Cola shifted from a simple product-presence logo approach at the Tour de France to a total experiential approach at the Atlanta Olympic village.

The Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique is an imaginative research methodology based on the premise that human thought is primarily image-based and communicates through metaphors. The technique has been tested and validated with more than twenty firms and 2,500 customers and managers. You can apply this research through specific steps:

• ask participants to take photographs or collect images from magazines or newspapers related to a particular topic;
• have participants sort the images based on similarities for underlying meaning analysis;
• ask participants to generate another picture that would reinforce or contradict the meaning of the current picture;
• ask participants to use nonvisual senses to convey the core meaning of the picture;
• have participants describe a short movie that portrays their thoughts and feelings;
• scan participants' pictures into a computer and have them manipulate the pictures electronically.

2. The Breadth and Scope of Experiential Marketing

Experiential marketing applies across diverse sectors including transportation, transitional retail, industrial components, professional services, and personal branding.

Multinationals like Gillette, Coca-Cola, and MasterCard use experiential marketing to sell millions of cans of soda and other global products. Companies use this approach to turn around declining brands, differentiate products from competitors, create corporate images and identities, promote innovations, and induce loyal consumption. While it serves as the core focus in consumer products, it acts as a valuable complementary approach in B2B and technology markets.

Applying Experiences Across Industries

Transportation vehicles like cars are quintessentially experiential products that engage all senses, feelings, and self-expression rather than just serving utilitarian functions. Ford used an experiential approach after acquiring Jaguar in 1989, issuing a fulfillment video, launching elegant web designs, and running lifestyle campaigns like Windows to connect the XJ8 with the consumer's passion for life.

Amtrak guided its revitalization using the formula that Brand equals Reputation plus Promise plus Experience, shifting away from an outdated image to humanize travel and give passengers self-enrichment. Amtrak launched a high-speed rail service from Boston to Washington, D.C., reaching speeds up to 150 m.p.h. and setting new interior and exterior design standards.

Singapore Airlines built its success on its distinct identity and continuous investment in selecting, training, and retaining flight attendants while offering top-tier cabin amenities. Singapore Airlines launched its Megatop 747s with a US$300 million product launch featuring Givenchy dinnerware, leather interiors, and minisuites in first class.

Transitional environments like transit stations and malls are ideal for sensory experiential marketing that evokes comforting traditional associations. Auntie Anne's uses a standardized color of Pantone blue 292 on a white background, ensures all sold pretzels were baked within the past half-hour, and features pictures of Anne herself making pretzels.

Meaningful Differentiation

Even industrial ingredients, high-tech components, and B2B products can successfully adopt experiential marketing by leveraging emotional and lifestyle associations. Du Pont Lycra used silhouette fashion ads with the slogan Define yourself, Polartec associated its recycled climate-control fabrics with elite outdoor sports, and Intel introduced an auditory four-tone jingle.

Professional services can bypass dry statistical pitches by using striking visual metaphors to communicate holistic approaches. Andersen Consulting broke from tradition in 1994 by launching campaigns featuring a school of fish forming a shark or five hawks pulling a giant fish from a lake to communicate holistic management.

Traditional medical practices can move away from cold, sterile clinical messaging by adopting empathetic, human-centric branding. Dr. Hal Teitelbaum and Dr. Robert Dinsmore renamed their medical practice Crystal Run Health Care LLP, adopting a curved blue stream logo and running Return of the family doctor advertisements.

Individuals such as artists, actors, and sports figures can be systematically managed and marketed as experiential brands. Fortune magazine estimated Michael Jordan's economic impact at $10 billion in 1998, with Gatorade executive Bill Schmidt noting that Jordan is managed just like a sports league property.

What traditional economists label as meaningless differentiation or irrelevant attributes are actually valid sensory and symbolic drivers from an experiential marketing perspective.

Professors Gregory Carpenter, Rashi Glazer, and Kent Nakamoto documented in the Journal of Marketing Research that consumers value attributes like Folger's flaked coffee crystals and Alberto Natural Silk shampoo.

3. A Framework for Managing Customer Experiences

You can systematically design customer experiences by combining five Strategic Experiential Modules with tactical Experience Providers.

Customer experiences can be categorized into five Strategic Experiential Modules, or SEMs, derived from the modular view of the mind. These modules correspond to distinct functional areas of human experience:

• Sense appeals to sensory inputs;
• Feel targets inner emotions;
• Think engages the intellect and problem-solving;
• Act impacts bodily experiences and lifestyles;
• Relate connects the individual to a broader social context.

Experience Providers, or ExPros, act as the tactical execution tools used by marketers to instantiate these modules. ExPros include communications, visual and verbal identity, product presence, co-branding, spatial environments, electronic media, and people. Marketers use these tools to build the Experiential Grid and shape the brand image.

Richart leverages an integrated sensory approach by positioning itself as a design company first. They use art deco packaging, glossy white boxes with silver or gold lettering, and display chocolates like fine jewelry in brightly lit showrooms. Richart sells a burlwood chocolate vault with temperature and humidity gauges for $650, and British Vogue called Richart Chocolates the most beautiful chocolates in the world.

Clinique launched its Happy fragrance by combining sunny orange packaging with lively television ads featuring movement, music, and the smiling model Kylie Bax. Clinique produced a limited-edition CD titled Happy, featuring songs such as Judy Garland's Get Happy and the Turtles' Happy Together.

Microsoft positioned itself as an enabler of infinite technological possibilities through its global ad campaign centered on a spatial metaphor. Microsoft launched a multimillion-dollar campaign created by Wieden & Kennedy featuring the slogan Where Do You Want to Go Today.

Nike transforms the experience of physical exercise by featuring famous athletes in action through a classic campaign that promotes direct physical engagement. Nike sells more than 160 million pairs of shoes a year, representing nearly one of every two pairs sold in the United States, largely propelled by the Just do it campaign.

Harley-Davidson acts as a Relate brand by turning ownership into a complete way of life, embedding the brand deeply into the personal identities of its enthusiasts. Enthusiasts across all social groups tattoo the Harley-Davidson logo on their bodies and view the brand as a defining symbol of a life lived to the fullest.

Singapore Airlines operates with the holistic goal of being visually appealing, hospitable, innovative, service-oriented, and international yet tied to its home culture. Retailers use magalogs to combine magazine content with product catalogs, embedding product offerings within broader editorial contexts such as art photography, travel notes, and cultural essays. Hermes published a dedicated issue of its magalog honoring trees, featuring features on Han and Tang dynasty pottery horses alongside luxury fashion spreads.

4. Sense and Feel Marketing

SENSE marketing appeals to the five senses to achieve three main strategic objectives: differentiate products, motivate customers to buy, and deliver unique value.

You use sensory stimulation as a tactical and strategic tool rather than a mere reflection of brand identity. You must balance sensory inputs to avoid understimulation or overload, applying the S-P-C model to manage stimuli, processes, and consequences.

Procter & Gamble launched Tide Mountain Fresh using cool, vivid colors, evocative outdoor language, and a scratch-and-sniff feature in print ads to create a coherent mountaintop sensory experience.

Managing Sensory Inputs

Corporate sensory identity manifests across four levels of abstraction known as the Four P's of visual identity: Properties, Products, Presentations, and Publications. Properties include buildings, offices, and vehicles. Products encompass the sensory aspects of physical goods and service cores. Presentations involve packaging, shopping bags, and service uniforms. Publications cover brochures, business cards, and advertising materials.

ITT Industries suffered from market confusion due to an inconsistent acronym, prompting Landor Associates to create a new logo and the engineered-for-life tag line to establish clarity. Two out of three respondents from the financial community mistakenly listed hotels, casinos, or telephone equipment as ITT Industries' key products before their rebranding.

Effective SENSE campaigns require a combination of cognitive consistency for conceptual structure and sensory variety to maintain attention and prevent boredom over time. Cognitive consistency provides an intellectual understanding of the underlying idea through stylistic and thematic repetition. Sensory variety uses changing executional elements like colors, lighting, and slogans to keep the campaign fresh.

In August 1995, Interbrand Newell & Sorrell was commissioned to translate British Airways' strategy into a visual identity. British Airways introduced World Images on airplane tail fins to celebrate cultural diversity, but dropped the design in July 1998 after business-class travelers and critics expressed dissatisfaction. The communications director left the company in May 1998 following the controversy.

Eliciting Consumption Emotions

FEEL marketing attaches affect and feelings to companies and brands, with consumption situations and face-to-face interactions playing the most crucial role in generating strong emotional bonds.

Advertising builds baseline affect or sets an interpretive frame, but true emotional devotion develops over time through repeated personal encounters. You must incorporate affect management into sales training because human contact strongly provokes feelings. In 1997, Victoria Gallegos sold $2 million of clothing as a top salesperson at Prada on Madison Avenue by focusing on personal customer connections.

Affective experiences range from unspecific moods to intense, stimulus-specific emotions that disrupt other activities. Moods can be elicited by unexpected minor stimuli like finding a coin, while emotions are intense reactions triggered by specific agents or objects. Häagen-Dazs cafés in Asia and Europe use romantic themes, ice cream cakes, and membership cards to link the brand with the pleasures of romantic love.

Consumer researcher Marsha Richins developed a reliable typology of sixteen consumption-related emotions plotted across positivity-negativity and receptivity dimensions. These emotions map into four quadrants that help predict consumer behavior. Resort guests receiving unexpected champagne feel excited and enthusiastic, whereas guests experiencing a dripping shower feel frustrated and irritated.

Emotional advertising alone has a tiny impact unless you have deep pockets and exercise patience. To build genuine attachment, you should follow specific steps:

• Have patience and rely on classical conditioning through repetition.
• Hire a good producer to create ads with narratives and sequels.
• Use ads as interpretive frames for consumption to help customers anticipate feelings.

Brands like Taster's Choice, Grey Poupon, Oreo cookies, and Hallmark succeeded with emotional advertising by producing commercials like movies with narrative story arcs.

5. Think and Act Marketing

You engage customer intellect through surprise, intrigue, and provocation while shaping physical behaviors and lifestyles.

Provoking the Intellect

THINK marketing targets the mind. You create experiences that surprise, intrigue, and provoke customers. Successful campaigns combine three elements:

• Create a sense of surprise visually, verbally, or conceptually
• Add a dose of intrigue
• Finish with a smack of provocation

Surprise departs from common expectations positively. Intrigue challenges deep assumptions regarding ontology, process, or time. Provocation stimulates discussion or controversy.

Epson color inkjet printer ads showed a woman in a bathing suit where higher DPI revealed the suit was painted on. The ads used 360 DPI, 720 DPI, and 1440 DPI resolution levels. RCN Telecom Services used an image of a Lenin statue with a noose and the headline No Empire Lasts Forever.

Creativity requires balancing convergent and divergent thinking modes. J.P. Guilford identified convergent thinking as analytical reasoning or rule-of-thumb heuristics. Divergent thinking involves perceptual fluency, flexibility, and originality based on domain knowledge.

Apple utilized striking black-and-white photographs of historical creative geniuses in the Think Different campaign created by Lee Clow of TBWA Chiat/Day. The campaign featured figures like Albert Einstein, Gandhi, Martha Graham, Amelia Earhart, and Rosa Parks to urge consumers to let their own creative genius shine through Apple products. The spring 1998 Apple market share was up for the first time in years, earning over $100 million after six consecutive quarterly losses. During this period, 278,000 units of the iMac were sold in six weeks.

Transforming Physical Routines

ACT marketing enriches lives by targeting the physical body and motor actions. You can transform ordinary consumer routines into high-performance sensory experiences through product design and aerodynamic branding.

Gillette spent six years and more than $750 million in researching and developing the Mach3, carrying thirty-six patents. The company retooled factories and employed manufacturing techniques from aerodynamics and ion-deposition to create a three-blade spring-mounted shaving system designed for speed and a new satisfying physical experience. A $300 million global marketing campaign for the Mach3 included an ad where a fighter jet breaks the sound barrier, transforming the pilot into a man standing in a futuristic bathroom as a sleek razor flies into his hand.

Nonverbal motor actions and body movements can unconsciously shape mental states, attitudes, and consumer behaviors without explicit cognitive awareness. Psychologist Jens Foerster demonstrated that vertical head movements versus horizontal head movements directly influence evaluative attitudes toward stimuli through automatic physical enactment. People evaluating stimuli like a product after moving their heads up and down rated those stimuli higher than when using horizontal head movements.

Lifestyle marketing requires brands to act as markers and indicators of a person's patterns of living, activities, interests, and opinions. Americans spent $587 annually on building, remodeling, decorating, gardening, and home electronics according to Home & Garden Television statistics. Jamba Juice menus provide a worldwide origin story for fruits, offer custom juice boosts like immunity or energy, and cater to special dietary needs.

6. Relate Marketing and Experiential Hybrids

RELATE marketing expands individual experiences by linking the customer self to broader social, cultural, and reference-group contexts through a brand.

While RELATE campaigns can trigger sense, feel, think, and act responses, their primary objective is building a relationship between the social meaning of the brand and the customer. Possessions serve as summary representations of abstract social entities, reflecting how consumers view their possessions as parts of themselves. The Palm III Organizer changed how business colleagues interact by letting users beam business cards via infrared ports, replacing traditional printed cards.

Social identity theory posits that individuals define themselves through group membership, which requires both identification with an ingroup and contrast with an out-group to satisfy a need for social distinctiveness. Nickelodeon transformed into a brand for, by, and about kids by adopting an us versus them battle cry that aligns kids against adult injustices. RELATE campaigns often successfully tap into the evolutionary biology of kin relations, where humans naturally feel greater trust, sympathy, and goodwill toward genetic relatives.

International RELATE campaigns must account for foundational cross-cultural differences such as individualism versus collectivism and universal human values. Shalom Schwartz's universal value model helps marketers ensure that targeted campaign values are compatible rather than conflicting, backed by over 200 samples verified in over 60 countries with 100,000 respondents. AT&T created distinct multicultural campaigns for Asian-American segments, such as addressing Japanese expatriate family dynamics versus Chinese foreign student separations.

Naming products after celebrities and collaborating directly with them on product development creates powerful RELATE associations through lifestyle appeal. Michael Jordan collaborated with designer Bijan on a men's fragrance, incorporating five distinct scent essences representing his nicknames, athletic career, and personal hobbies, supported by a $2.5 million value of Bijan wardrobe designed for Jordan and a $20 million advertising campaign.

Building Social Identity and Brand Communities

Consumers establish intimate relationships with brands and form structured brand communities where they share rituals, moral responsibility, and a consciousness of kin. Through basking in the reflected glory, consumers feel good about themselves by associating with successful brand groups. Saab and Bronco owners exhibit brand community traits by flashing headlights, waving at fellow drivers, and pulling over to help strangers with the same car on the road.

Experiential marketing moves from mono-experiential tactics to multiexperiential hybrids and ultimately holistic experiences that integrate all five strategic experiential modules. Strategic experiential modules divide into individual experiences and shared sociocultural experiences. Shiseido's 5S stores in Soho integrate museum-like design, natural ingredients, custom ambient surround-sound music, and eco-conscious policies into a holistic cosmetic experience. Volkswagen faced a $1.1 billion worldwide loss and less than 1 percent U.S. market share in 1993 before launching the New Beetle with a $35 million estimated annual advertising campaign, while SoBe reached $67 million in sales in 1998.

The Experiential Wheel

The Experiential Wheel serves as a strategic planning tool to build experiential hybrids and holistic experiences by utilizing intentional experiential connectors.

When starting from scratch, the recommended sequence follows the module order: SENSE attracts attention, FEEL builds emotional bonds, THINK adds cognitive interest, ACT encourages behavioral commitment, and RELATE provides broader social meaning. Volkswagen used the New Beetle's retro-futuristic shape as a SENSE connector to evoke smiles and memories, which linked into FEEL nostalgia, THINK innovation, ACT individualism, and RELATE flower-power counterculture.

You can apply this planning tool directly to your own organization:

• Assess whether current corporate identity or communications lack competitive advantage or feel too simplistic.
• Determine how to leverage components of the current experiential approach for the new experience using experiential connectors.
• Ask how to interconnect modules so the whole becomes far more than the sum of its parts rather than simply placing experiences next to each other.

7. Building the Experience-Oriented Organization

Building an experience-oriented organization requires fostering a passionate, creative culture that thrives on controlled chaos rather than rigid bureaucracy.

While rational Apollonian structures maintain order, the Dionysian culture embraces dreaming, iconoclasts, transparent communication, and guerrilla strategies from bottom-up change agents. You can apply this culture directly to your workplace:

• Start dreaming and list wild long-term customer experiences.
• Send in iconoclasts who challenge established customs.
• Quit corporate bull and eliminate bullet points in meetings.
• Infiltrate the organization bottom-up through guerrilla strategies.

IBM hired Louis Gerstner, and LVMH chairman Bernard Arnault hired flamboyant designers like John Galliano and Alexander McQueen to shake up traditional corporate cultures.

Systematic oscillation between polar opposites generates higher-order creative syntheses for business problem solving. You can harness polarity by maintaining conflicting viewpoints and actively cycling through extreme perspectives. Use this process in meetings:

• Ask a group for their true opinions on an issue as the thesis.
• Divide the group and push their views into extreme, opposing antitheses.
• Bring the groups together to share positions and force a new solution.
• Iterate the process to achieve a creatively enriched synthesis.

Gerald Hirshberg founded Nissan Design International as an autonomous facility that combined American design and Japanese engineering within a high-energy, colliding culture.

Managing Strategic Issues and Organizational Culture

Managing the Experiential Grid involves four core dimensions: intensity, breadth, depth, and linkage. Strategists must balance intensity by avoiding diffusion or overdoing emotional appeals. Hallmark balanced its FEEL approach by enriching physical retail stores with quiet spaces and comfortable writing surfaces while exploring THINK and RELATE via digital platforms.

Target audience age and historical context dictate receptivity to different experiential marketing approaches. Peter Levine of DGA Consulting researched Baby Boomers, GenXers, and GenYers, concluding that younger generations are more responsive to experiential marketing than Boomers.

Quantitative seven-point rating scales can evaluate the degree to which an ExPro appeals to specific sensory, affective, cognitive, behavioral, or relational experiences. You should use these validated scales with three concrete steps:

• Use seven-point rating scales ranging from not at all to very much.
• Code negatively worded items reversely.
• Combine the scale with strategic experiential modeling and experiential profiling.

Designing workspaces around nature and human intellectual capital directly improves operational safety, morale, and creative output. Prince Street Technologies integrated natural light, wildflowers, and modular workstations into its plant, resulting in zero lost-time accidents in 1997 compared to twenty-six in 1995.

You must also improve your workplace through specific internal practices:

• Improve physical office environments by changing lighting and bringing in props.
• Broaden staff recruitment searches to design, architecture, and anthropology schools.
• Promote personal experiential growth through travel, new hobbies, and challenging routines.

10 Key Ideas

1. Economic value has progressed from commodities to goods, services, and now experiences, requiring you to abandon narrow feature-driven marketing.
2. Experiential marketing applies across diverse sectors including transportation, transitional retail, industrial components, professional services, and personal branding.
3. You can systematically design customer experiences by combining five Strategic Experiential Modules with tactical Experience Providers.
4. SENSE marketing appeals to the five senses to achieve three main strategic objectives: differentiate products, motivate customers to buy, and deliver unique value.
5. FEEL marketing attaches affect and feelings to companies and brands, with consumption situations and face-to-face interactions playing the most crucial role in generating strong emotional bonds.
6. You engage customer intellect through surprise, intrigue, and provocation while shaping physical behaviors and lifestyles.
7. RELATE marketing expands individual experiences by linking the customer self to broader social, cultural, and reference-group contexts through a brand.
8. What traditional economists label as meaningless differentiation or irrelevant attributes are actually valid sensory and symbolic drivers from an experiential marketing perspective.
9. The Experiential Wheel serves as a strategic planning tool to build experiential hybrids and holistic experiences by utilizing intentional experiential connectors.
10. Building an experience-oriented organization requires fostering a passionate, creative culture that thrives on controlled chaos rather than rigid bureaucracy.