Through traditional marketing tactics, it has become challenging to win the hearts of your potential buyers and keep them engaged with your offerings. We live in a world where customers can actively opt-out after seeing multiple marketing ads. So, what approach can marketers use to build credibility and spark a long-lasting connection between the brand and the customers? To make it happen, marketers and businesses are focusing on experiential marketing campaigns to utilize the power of live events.

Experiential marketing campaigns show excellent results with their live, immersive, and interactive strategies. This marketing approach is about creating unforgettable memories for the users that can strengthen the relationship between brands and consumers. 65% of the brands that use experiential marketing say that this marketing technique can perfectly correlate with sales.

You must be wondering what experiential marketing is, and it can help businesses drive more sales. This article will uncover 15 experiential marketing campaigns to help you understand how to grow your business with this advanced marketing tactic.

Experiential Marketing

Experiential marketing (aka engagement marketing) is an advanced marketing technique that attracts customers to interact with a business in a real-world situation. It is a fun and interactive way to help customers remember your brand and build a loyal relationship with it. Experiential marketing has become more significant than ever, as studies highlight that millennials are likelier to stick with a brand they know and trust.

15 Experiential Marketing Campaigns to Inspire Your Next Creativity

Experiential marketing campaigns provide customers with real-world opportunities to interact directly and engage with a brand. This idea creates a tangible experience that can have a more valuable and memorable impact on the consumers.

Experiential marketing events will not encourage customers to purchase a brand but also share their experience with their family and friends. A report by EventTrack shows that 70% of the users become regular customers after an experiential marketing campaign. Above this, 80% of attendees report that free samples and live demonstrations can significantly impact their purchasing decisions.

Are you interested in slicing off your piece of the experiential pie? Learn some valuable insights from the below-given 15 experiential marketing campaigns or contact us.

1.  The Gatorade Combine

When creating a state-of-the-art experiential marketing campaign, Gatorade-the sports drink company, gave a stellar idea. The company created an experiential event where participants could test their athletic powers.

In the campaign, combines are created to access the rookie athletes before allowing them to enter the professional league. It gave the consumers of Gatorade a chance to see what it would be like to be an athlete in their life. The company combined with other reputable brands, such as Sparta Science and Xbox Kinect, to bring more charm to its combination with reflex rates, flexibility challenges, and jump stations.

Through its experiential marketing campaign, Gatorade provided its customers with professionally tracked and valuable information about their fitness levels. This event had a remarkable impact on Gatorade users. Whenever they thought about their fitness after the campaign, they surely thought about the brand.

2.  The Budweiser Beer Garage

Anheuser Busch created a thought-provoking experiential marketing campaign at the 2016 SXSW festival. The 4D virtual tour of Budweiser’s brewing plant was the most remarkable aspect of the event. The brand gave its consumers an utterly sensory experience using virtual reality headsets. Apart from hearing and seeing the brewery, the heat was blasted when attendees entered the boiler room, ice-cold air was blown when they came to the refrigerator, and jars of hops were held under their noses when they arrived in the hops room.

Budweiser created a real-world experience by engaging attendees with their five senses. This experiential marketing campaign helped users gain better insights about the product. It also assisted the brand in building a more profound and loyal relationship with its consumers.

3.  Social Swipe Billboard of Misereor’s

When Misereor learned that about 357 billion non-cash transactions are made each year worldwide, they decided to cash in on this number with their Social Swipe charity donation billboards. Misereor-a German NGO, started the digital billboards with images highlighting some of the world issues they struggled to overcome. They used wrists tied together to combat criminal punishments and a loaf of bread to portray hunger.

The NGO equipped its screen with a credit card reader. People were invited to make donations using credit cards. The static image came to life when attendees donated by swapping credit cards. For example, when a participant donated, the tied hands were freed, or a slice of bread was cut on the screen.

With this immersive experiential marketing campaign, Misereor was able to present a clear representation of the impact of the donations. This event helped the NGO to turn its participants into a series of donations.

4.  #WeighThis by Lean Cuisine

Lean Cuisine is a frozen food brand that aims to provide low-calorie and healthy diets. The brand took a refreshing and exciting experiential marketing campaign names #WeighThis. To identify their consumers’ concerns about their body weights, Lean Cuisine asked the women participants how they would like to be weighed apart from their body weight.

People gave their preferred answers. For example, some said they would love to be weighed by their education or the love they gave to their family and friends. Lean Cuisine invited professional sign painters to write down how attendees wanted to entertain themselves. This was one of the most potent experiential marketing campaigns that garnered over 211 million impressions.

#WeighThis campaign helped Lean Cuisine create a deeper and more valuable relationship with customers while encouraging them to share the hashtag with others on social media.

5.  3D Printed Oreos

At the SXSW 2014 festival, Mondelez International introduced a digital version of their world-famous Oreo cookie. For this experiential marketing campaign, Oreo teamed up with Twitter and a 3D printing technology to a 3D printer that can spit out real Oreos.

The 3D printer allowed participants to print their own highly-customized and personalized Oreo cookies. The brand used a fun and innovative approach to entirely different territories to create a mind-blowing experiential marketing campaign.

By aligning cutting-edge technology with the age-old brand, Oreo used a tangible way to keep its cookies at the top of the consumers’ minds.

6.  Stratos Stunt by Redbull

Redbull Stratos Stunt was one of the famous experiential marketing campaigns. The brand hired a professional skydiver Felix Baumgartner and sent him into the stratosphere to set a record for the highest parachute jump. Felix Baumgartner became the first man who broke the speed of sound in freefall.

With this stunning campaign, Redbull could not only push it to the higher limit possible but took other ownership of its brand’s identity. The world’s prominent news organizations featured the stunt, plus the YouTube video of the action got 4 million views. The campaign boosted exposure to Redbull worldwide.

Redbull used its brand motto of “Redbull gives you wings” to push the boundaries and embrace the extreme.

7.  Tweet to Get Ice Cream by Ben and Jerry’s

Ben and Jerry’s combined the flavors of digital and experiential marketing to create a palpable combination. Through their campaign, they emphasized that the two are the perfect complement to one another.

In their experiential marketing campaign, Ben and Jerry’s allowed users to tweet to get free ice cream. Not only did the brands open this line of communication for the users. But they also delivered free ice creams by having their sampling truck.

This experiential campaign by Ben and Jerry’s highlighted that you could leverage the power of social media to build brand awareness and loyalty.

8.  29Rooms by Refinery29

For the past three years, the world’s famous lifestyle brand Refinery29 has hosted a 29Rooms campaign during New York Fashion Week. This campaign features a fun house, including museum-like rooms where attendees can touch and interact with the art.

Refinery29 created rooms by partnering with brands ranging from musicians and artists to companies like Cadillac, Donuts, and Dunkin. Each year, the brand uses a different theme for its 29Rooms experiential marketing campaign. In the campaign, attendees are encouraged to enter each room and interact with their surroundings to create something different. This is one of the most interesting, creative, and hands-on experiential marketing campaigns for users.

29Rooms by Refinery29 highlights that you can team up with artists and musicians to engage customers in a fun and entertaining manner.

9.  Weather Rooms by Globetrotter

The key to an experiential marketing campaign is letting consumers see and use your products. Globetrotter-a leading European sporting equipment company, used an immersive experiential marketing campaign to let users observe the effectiveness of their products.

In this campaign, the buyers of the Globetrotter stepped into the rain chambers that stimulated them with harsh winds and were doused with water. Many stores of the Globetrotter have a freezer compartment. So, the brand built a campaign to highlight this feature of its stores that allowed attendees to try on and test Globetrotter gear.

The attendees who tried and tested the gear became high-paying customers of the Globetrotter. They also recommended the products to others, making the campaign a valuable experience for the brand.

10.  Impact Challenge by Google

It is not always necessary to relate your experiential marketing campaign with your company’s purpose. You can also focus on some impactful things that can make lasting marks on your customers’ minds and hearts.

The greatest experiential marketing campaign used by Google can give some valuable insights about creating an impactful marketing campaign without sticking to your organizational goals. Google gave away $5.5 million to non-profits in the San Francisco Bay Area and let the users decide where this money would go.

Google installed interactive posters for its campaign to let users vote for a cause they cared about. This experiential marketing campaign indirectly helped people interact with the brand, giving them a memorable experience. The impact challenge by Google got an immersive response. More than 72% of the users said they viewed the brand positively when it provided them with a great and memorable experience. 

11.  #Jumpwithdrose by Adidas

Adidas set up a new store in London and started an experiential marketing campaign. The brand had Chicago Bulls point guard Derrick Rose, who has a reputation for jumping abilities. Derrick Rose was sponsoring the new line of Adidas sneakers. Adidas challenged the fans to win a pair of trainers by taking them off a 10-foot-high shelf.

Fans of Derrick Rose were flooded to meet and interact with him. They tried to complete the challenge, which encouraged the sales of the sneakers. The brand filmed that marketing campaign and shared it with the public. The original video got more than 5 million views.

#Jumpwithrose experiential marketing campaign shows how brands/businesses can use social media to support an event. Plus, how you can host a memorable event to create buzz around your newly launched products.

12.  FIFA World Cup VR Experience by Coca-Cola

During the FIFA World Cup, Coca-Cola used an engaging experiential marketing campaign to keep its beverages at the top. The brand placed a VR experience ahead of a train station in Zurich. With the experience, people could stand in front of a screen and see a soccer player next to them. The VR experience also allowed attendees to practice soccer moves with a famous soccer player or compete in their mini-soccer tournament.

This experiential marketing campaign had some scalable marketing strategies associated with it. For example, marketers can host an expert to give attendees an experience of value. Marketers can also embrace major events to place their marketing campaigns related to that event or audience.

13.  Great Sensitivity Test by GSK Sensodyne

GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) set up three interactive zones for experiential marketing campaigns near London’s Tower Bridge when launching their Sensodyne Complete Protection toothpaste. In zone one, people could get a tooth sensitivity check, win prizes, and see a demo of the newly launched product. In zone two, they asked people to take pictures near a giant tooth, which they could later share on social media. In zone three, GSK tried to conduct the world’s largest oral hygiene lesson.

GSK and their newly launched product got 150 social media mentions through this campaign. The event helped the brand create awareness of its product and attract more customers.

14.  Pay It Forward with Chocolate by Milka

The chocolate company Milka started a simple experiential marketing campaign in which they left out a square of Milka chocolate from a purchased bar. Through this campaign, Milka received a noticeable response from people.

The person who received free chocolate or had the good feeling of sharing it with family and friends gave a massive shout to Milka mail. This approach helped the brand to raise double awareness for their brand.

15.  Rickmobile by Rick & Morty

Cartoon Network delivered a car around the country shaped like Rick (the show’s main character) to promote their animated Adult Swim series, Rick & Morty. Through this campaign, people started following where the Rickmobile was via a live destination page of the adult swim site.

When Rickmobile reached the major cities, people flocked to it to get a picture with Rick’s face and enter the mobile where they could buy some products related to that show.

This experiential marketing campaign showed that embracing social media is okay to create excitement around your pop-up.

The Bottom Line

Experiential marketing is a proven strategy to create a buzz for your company. Whether you want to host a marketing event or not, our 15 experiential marketing campaigns can give some valuable insights you can implement in your regular marketing campaigns.