Audi understands experiential marketing

According to Wikipedia, experiential marketing "presents an experience that people choose to attend and participate in after identifying the relevance of a brand or product to their needs." This seems pretty accurate of the Audi event I attended two weeks ago. (For details of the event, check out The Audi Driving Experience on my personal blog.)

While experiential marketing is one of the most expensive forms of advertising, I believe it'll continue to gain importance during the coming years. Let's face it, people are becoming immune to advertisements. They've got Tivo to skip TV commercials, pop-up and banner blockers to skip internet ads, satellite radio without commercials, spam filters for email ads, and the national "do not call" registry to avoid telemarketers. How will companies continue to reach their audiences in the future? I say it'll be experiential marketing.

Experiential marketing is similar to public relations in that the goal of good PR is that other people (editors, journalists, bloggers) say something good about your company or product. Therefore, you feel that you're getting an unbiased recommendation regarding the product. It's even better if the recommendation comes from a trusted source or a friend. This is exactly what Facebook's new Beacon advertising platform is capitalizing on. (For reference, Beacon broadcasts your Facebook friend's actions to you through the site. For example you might see something like "Vince bought Nine Inch Nails - Year Zero at Amazon.com" if I was your Facebook friend.)

Experiential marketing lets you test the product yourself and form your own opinion. This is good because you don't feel that you're being subjected to advertising, even though you are. After all, you are putting the product through it's paces and you'll form your own opinion, right? But there are all sorts of ways to bias you from the beginning.

There's also a halo effect when you tell your friends about how impressed you were with the product, as I did after driving Audi's fleet of cars. But the hard part as a company is getting the right people at your experiential marketing event. It's important to target the right folks with the right message, just like in any form of marketing but due to the high cost, it's especially important in experiential marketing.

Audi did a great job of this with their driving event at Infineon Raceway. I'm not sure how they selected people (I registered on their website) but the event was first-class from beginning to end. I, and many others at the event, left feeling great about the Audi brand and it's products. The event was so fun that I'm sure Audi enjoyed having more people as converted brand evangelists.

The danger with experiential marketing is in creating a bad experience. But this wasn't a problem for Audi. Starting with registration, we were greeted promptly and registered quickly. Following that I received a nice little lanyard and badge with my name on it and was directed to the pristine, stainless steel, Scandinavian designed lounge for complimentary coffee and breakfast snacks while awaiting my turn to drive. In the lounge were beautiful B&O plasma TVs and sound systems playing, of course, Audi infomercials. The experience started to set positive impressions before I'd even sat in one of the cars, thus pre-disposing me for a good time and a good image of the Audi products.



Driving the cars was the icing on the cake thanks to an overall great experience. For successful experiential marketing you've got to have a great product too since schmoozing will only get you so far. Had the cars been pieces of junk, the whole experience would've fallen apart. But with experiential marketing always remember the details. If people have to wait in line too long, or the staff isn't friendly, it'll set the stage for failure.