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24 August 2014

Experiential marketing through apps: Being emotional for social activation

Posted by: Vishal Adsool

Experiential Marketing and Market Activation have always gone hand in hand. Whereas the purpose of Market Activation is only to highlight the trust and prove all the claims made by the brand are true, Experiential Marketing spans a much wider spectrum of involvement of audience through application and emotion.



While ideating and developing the Experiential Marketing strategy matrix for one of the popular automobile company as a technology consultant and the sole technology vendor, we realized that Social Media has a lot to offer here in a limited budget as opposed to the traditional Experiential marketing where the investments are usually sky high. However for Social Media using just the share button for sharing socially does not always help. What really helps is ensuring that the target market gets emotionally involved and attached to the activation activity and shares it after that. Why that is necessary is because consciously or subconsciously people always tend to monitor their 'like', 're-tweet' and '+1' and if they are a frequent sharer on Social Network, not always will be their content noticed by their followers and friends unless they are too popular. Following are some emotions that are usually destined to yield results while building Experiential Marketing Apps. 


Social Emotion: 

Consider a cause as social as "Stop Corruption". A Gandhi'an raised the voice against it through Social media and mostly the youth came out with candles all across the country. Even wrong and the right powerful political people have experimented blending their agenda with a Social cause in their fights and leading to the downfall of impossibly stable and supposedly invincible governments in the past. Whereas the Gandhi'an could not leverage on the publicity because of the rift in his team, the rightfully powerful person is now at the right place. We were also able to witness the impact of this media through the number of people that voted. It was certainly a all-time-high turn out of voters with 10% alone being first time voters. The media was flourished with all kinds of applications that supported a political party and surprisingly the political party that ignored, lost! Now thats the impact of such applications on public awareness and showing the people exactly what they need to know and not the otherwise. 

Environmental, Biological and Geological Emotion: 

"Save the tiger" campaign is an excellent example of one of such campaigns that was put up by Aircel - A popular telecom company from India. It was in association with NDTV India and the campaign got great results. Aircel, usually popular within Metro cities now was suddenly the talk of the town with its "Save the tiger" campaign where the message clearly indicated that there are just 1411 tigers left in India and the number has shrink from 40,000. That was a surprise for most of the audience and since a 'surprise' kind of emotion crosses the threshold of like'less risk, people usually felt comfortable in sharing the cause almost immediately. That campaign was a huge success. 

Supportive Emotion:

The ALS Ice Bucket challenge too is doing a lot of rounds on the internet where you nominate people to donate through a unique campaign to promote awareness of the disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Hats off to the team that thought about the campaign but what would make it even the more viral is making people understand what ALS is through a Facebook or Mobile application that immerses you through a simulated video that triggers emotions again to cross the threshold for sharing on Social Media and then taking a picture through the app so that all images land up on a common page. This emotion is certainly a supportive kind of emotion. There is another place where you get to see this kind of emotion. Check out the DP/profile photo with the American Flag or Indian Flag Or even the flag of your favorite sports team or a cause. It is probably a very common kind of profile photo that you get to see especially when a particular game season is going on or specifically during the Independence day. There are brands that have carried out their campaigns like "Choose your dream team" and "Player trade" that persuade people to visit the campaign application daily and apart from advertisements what they usually don't notice is their info getting appended to database for next marketing campaigns. Certainly these kind of emotions usually go viral. 


Facebook apparently/allegedly carried out a study that revels that Facebook can manipulate the mood of people. Naturally, they have a user base as big as four times as that of France and just imagine the sample size that they would get for studying the intimate details of each of these users. Greater the user base and higher is the probability that they'd guess "which product sells where?". Experiential marketing does the same for you through Facebook and mobile application. It just helps you gather a huge user base data for creating a specialized offering enough for you to test the product launch and increase brand loyalty in a particular neighborhood or a clan. 

From various automobile companies to Shaving creams as well as from OOH advertisers to educational institutes, Equations Work has been popular in helping creating applications on specially Facebook and Mobile. Some of the applications delivered by Equations Work have had hits as high as 100,000 in a weeks time. Talk to us if you have an idea for creating your campaign and we'd be glad to throw in a couple of more ideas through the technology lens and angle. 

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