From Diageo’s famed Journey of Flavour to Ben & Jerry’s factory tours, brand home experiences are unique moments that bring consumers closer to a brand. This curated and personalized memory creates a bond through emotion, making winning over consumers and learning more about their lives easier.
All this emotional impact sounds great, but what kind of results do brand home experiences have overall? Memories are a sweet goal, but a brand’s survival and growth depend on more than good feelings.
In this blog, we’ll dive into how brand home experiences work to impact hearts, minds, and bottom lines. The diverse and creative world of brand home experiences affects more than day-to-day; they change how a brand does business.
What is a Brand Home Experience?
A brand home experience is a part of a brand home beyond retail, restaurants, and gift shops. It’s a tour, a tasting, a virtual game, anything that creates immersion in your brand.
For example, a brewery like Sierra Nevada will host special tours through how they make their beer to bring drinkers into the process. That way, they have more to offer outside of tap rooms and shopping. Their “guest-centric approach” (their words) is a key part of how they strategically think about their brand.
Why do they care so much? Keep reading; we’ll walk you through the results of the brand home experience.
Improves Consumer Brand Perception and Loyalty
Human beings crave connection; it’s part of what makes social media so addictive. We love the dopamine that comes with emotion, but the digital space has become overcrowded. Brands have noticed that online consumers have become increasingly inundated with ads and messaging, making it hard to have any real connection outside a glowing screen, fighting for eyes.
Brand home experiences are the antidote to the digital headache: they encourage consumers to put down their screens (or, in the case of augmented reality, pick a new one up) and live in the moment with your brand.
Our data shows that this works; we at AnyRoad are the experiential marketing platform for consumer brands, and many of our customers host brand home experiences to help with their growth.
Although each brand that uses us can see their benchmarks and industry ones, we can openly share that the average net promoter score of a brand home experience starts at 34 and increases to 84 after a visit. Consumers in 2023 were positively impacted by brand home experiences, increasing their scores on average by 147% across all demographics.
What’s a Net Promoter Score (NPS)?
A net promoter score (NPS) is a rating from one to ten from consumers about how likely they are to recommend a brand to a friend. Often, operators use this metric to determine brand perception and inform loyalty. However, this metric is for an experience when you consider how their NPS increased or decreased. We consider this a brand conversion rate.
Brings in Additional Revenue for Brand Homes Overall
Brand home experiences are great for bringing in additional revenue, empowering brand home operators to meet their sales goals for the brand, and re-invest in more immersion and personalization.
Consumers are more likely to buy add-ons and visit the gift shop after they feel like they’re part of the brand’s community. When operators listen to consumer and visitor feedback, they can use suggestions to create more targeted and tailored experiences, where they can charge more for a VIP treatment or special visit-only releases of products.
One example of a successful brand home experience that took this to heart is Old Dominick, a distillery in the heart of Memphis. Ben Brown, the Director of Guest Experience at Old Dominick Distillery, used consumer feedback to introduce new events that let him sell more tickets and more.
“We’ve started offering bourbon and brushstrokes nights, salsa nights, and VIP tours. Not only do events like these sell out, they allow us to start building relationships with new customers.” - Ben Brown, Director of Guest Experience at Old Dominick Distillery
Helps Leadership Determine Product Distribution Direction
It can be expensive to purchase demographic studies when you’re looking to expand distribution. Often, it can be like throwing spaghetti at a wall, hoping something sticks. When you notice who’s coming to your brand home experience, operators can offer leadership more than revenue: they can supply important demographic information like location and buying habits.
For example, how far are consumers willing to travel to your brand home? When they sign up for an experience, and even in a survey after the fact, you can collect key information to grow and scale experience and brand.
Leiper’s Fork Distillery did exactly that when they came on with AnyRoad. They decided to use their brand home tour and tasting information from our platform to work smarter, not harder, and use critical business insights to improve their strategy and distribution.
“The information we get from AnyRoad is helping us refine the experiences we create for our customers, our retail approach, and even our social media messaging.” -Matt King, General Manager of Leiper’s Fork
Gives Clarity to Marketing on Where Their Ad Dollars are Best Spent
Another benefit of brand home experiences is the collaboration between operators and marketing teams. Marketers are equipped with great tools when it comes to learning and growing with data. But some ad spend isn’t quite measurable, like billboards or magazine spreads.
That’s where brand home experiences come in. To learn where those dedicated consumers are coming from, operators can include questions in their follow-up survey or even during ticketed registration, asking key questions that help marketing narrow their scope and spend their budget more efficiently.
Operators can even collect marketing opt-ins, which open a direct line of communication between the marketing department and consumers. This strategy helps marketers reach consumers at the right times for better lifetime value and spending.
An example of effective collaboration between marketing and operations, and roles that combine the two, comes directly from Burnt Church Distillery in South Carolina. They use their information to strategize distribution and measure the impact of ad spend based on where consumers say they first heard of the distillery tour.
“We’ve got billboards on I-95 advertising the tour. It sounds old school, but I justify the cost by showing the owners exactly how many of our guests say they found out about the tour from one of those billboards. That’s incredibly helpful in making sure we’re putting our marketing budget where it will have the biggest impact.” - Chris Crowe, General Manager of Burnt Chuch Distillery
The Takeaway
Brand home experiences aren’t just warm fuzzy memories for consumers; they’re powerful marketing tools that promote loyalty and increase average consumer spending. From the bottom to the top, the data that brand home experiences collect is vital for scaling, like distribution information and ad spend effectiveness.
To cut through the digital noise of the modern age, brands need a more creative offering to attract consumers. These in-person immersions bring consumers closer and create attachments that last beyond the visit.
For an even deeper understanding of what successful brand home experiences look like, check out our guide!
