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You’re busy, we’re busy. We get it. So here’s ‘6 Brand Experience Examples That Prioritize Customer Loyalty’ in four sentences or less:
When you want to create experiences that put customer loyalty at the heart of your strategy, learn from the best.
Here’s the pattern for what customer loyalty and branded experience success look like:
- Personalization
- Listening to feedback
- Internal support
- Evergreen planning
- Planning for the unexpected
Dig Deeper
Branded experiences are the new hot marketing strategy, and you’re riding the wave. But how do you take your current marketing efforts and make a brand strategy that prioritizes your customer base?
You’re not alone. 9 out of 10 marketers agree that brand experiences are vital to their overall success.
Understanding how your branded experiences improve consumer loyalty will get you on the right path to think about events in a new light, aiming for lasting impressions instead of getting the strategy itself off the ground.
What makes branded experiences memorable?
Think of the canned soup your mom made you on a snow day. What about the first pair of ballet shoes you got your daughter when she was 8? When you remember those moments, you’re hit with nostalgia, warmth, and a sense of loss that drives you to feel it all again.
These experiences stay with you for the rest of your life, as do the brands that were a part of the moment.
This community building opens the door for brands to connect with buyers and leave a lasting impression. But that’s not just guesswork.
A good, memorable brand experience takes dedicated research, in-depth audience knowledge, and an understanding of where stories and business intersect.
The best of the best know how to start a one-to-one conversation with their customers. These brand experiences capture behavioral and demographic data in a transparent value exchange. When done well, events go deeper than advertising campaigns, which are less effective than ever.
You connect your brand to a memory, a feeling through innovation and real-life events. You create company attachment when you deliver moments that resonate — just like soup and ballet shoes.
So, let’s dive in! Here are 6 brand experience examples that evoke feeling and prioritize consumer loyalty.
Pop-Up Brand Experience Example: JUST Egg Goes Repeatable & Evergreen
Everyone knows about seasonality; warm months and holidays make building your event calendar simple. But that doesn’t give you a solid plan for a repeatable, months-long strategy.
To create an evergreen brand experience, consistency is the name of the game. Whether you’re going global or expanding and need a better foothold, taking your brand to consumers means creating a sense of place and one that’s targeted.
Evergreen branded experiences balance reaching new audiences, continuously engaging current customers, and converting new visitors into brand promoters. So, going in with understanding is vital.
However, creating an evergreen branded experience doesn’t mean developing a strategy and sticking to it until the end of time. All marketing is about regularly improving and adjusting your experiential efforts to remain authentic and relevant.
The JUST Egg Story
JUST Egg, a plant-based egg made by Eat Just, learned through market research that the biggest barrier to getting consumers to try their product was hesitation about whether a plant-based egg could taste as good or better than one from a chicken. Yet, 90% of tasters go on to buy it.
Heading into 2022, field marketer Adrian Santos and his team planned 300 events nationwide with a goal to double the number of eggs in mouths every quarter. From prior experience, Adrian knew that setting up a data-centric program would help him to prove the value of his field marketing investment to the company’s C-suite.
Immediately after the event, Adrian checked Atlas, the platform’s analytics engine, to better understand who the attendees were, how they impacted them, and how to improve.
Here’s what he found:
- Feedback — They discovered a critical product problem: the egg was served with spinach and tomatoes on a sandwich, but event attendees reported that the vegetables made the sandwich soggy.
- Vital location info — Although the event was in the Washington, D.C. area, many attendees were from New York.
The result? A better sandwich with a new location to add to the map. With the NYC demographic interested in JUST Egg products, Adrian realized they should add New York events to the schedule to spread more education and excitement.
Surprise and Delight Experiences - Diageo
As Didi Bethurum, CCO of Meow Wolf, said in ‘The Business of Memorable Experiences’:
“A lot of it ensures we’re still taking risks. That’s how we know we’re growing. That we as a company continue to give ourselves permission to take risks and try to surprise people in a different way.”
Surprise and delight is a methodology where the goal of an experience is to wow customers and visitors, especially for brand homes and events. When a brand makes a statement about who they are, it sometimes can feel like the emotional piece is missing.
Personalization is a strategy that falls under this category.
Brands that understand this principle tend to create a participatory environment where interaction is a huge piece of the experience, building trust, education, and brand loyalty.
The Diageo Story
Diageo took this principle to heart in their famed Johnnie Walker Princes Street brand home. Through sight, taste, and intense personalization, they created a must-visit destination for tourists and natives alike in Edinburgh, Scotland.
The Journey of Flavour is self-described as a “multi-media adventure” and “an epic journey through live performances, light shows, tastings, and more.”
- Take the Johnnie Walker flavour quiz to discover your personal flavour profile so we can tailor the tour to your tastebuds.
- Enjoy a highly immersive, 90-minute sensory experience led by our Johnnie Walker experts
- Throughout the tour, you’ll be served three delicious whisky cocktails tailor-made to your flavour profile, and of course, you can opt for a dram or a non-alcoholic mocktail if you’d prefer.
Note the discounts for the end of their experience. This kind of personal profile creates loyalty where their visitor feels the effort the brand went to. Through participation tailored to them specifically, they leave feeling (you guessed it) surprise and delight.
Team Investment Experience Example - Stranahan
Creating brand advocates and cultivating brand loyalty starts in-house. To earn consumer loyalty, your team culture is fundamental. Cheerleaders and champions can be found everywhere, and the more hyped your team is, the more impact your experiential marketing will have.
You'll see your team return the favor when you support a culture that fosters collaboration, solidarity, and open communication. Sharing consumer feedback, bringing your disparate teams together as one, and investing in their future does a lot for morale and even more for growth.
More often than not, your team has more ideas and understanding of problems and opportunity areas than anyone else. Their suggestions for improvement and scaling will be more targeted and effective because of their boots on the ground and their passion for the experience.
The Stranahan Story
At Stranahan's, fostering that team engagement culture begins with communication. They recognize their team members are instrumental in delivering exceptional experiences to guests. So, how do they show their investment? Stranahan keeps them in the know.
By providing regular updates on guest satisfaction metrics, Stranahan's keeps their staff in the loop celebrates their wins, and shows them what areas they can improve.
Moreover, the distillery goes above and beyond by strongly emphasizing comprehensive training for new employees.
Thorough training programs bring newcomers on board in a welcoming way and equips them with the knowledge and skills necessary to uphold the brand's commitment to excellence. The staff knows that the brand has their best interest at heart and wants them to succeed.
Stranahan offers autonomy and an invitation to make the experience their own by giving their team members the tools they need.
Festival Activation Example - POPLIFE
Tech has become the core engine of many a branded experience strategy. An incredible amount of work goes into creating relevant and strategic events. Being able to get the info teams need across multiple avenues, not just foot traffic, is a huge deal.
For the first time, event marketers and the industry as a whole can measure the same level of performance as their digital counterparts at the same time as improving consumer experience.
Festival marketing relies on informed decisions, intimate consumer knowledge, and a finger on the pulse of trending values. Some of our favorite brand experience tools include:
- Analytics and Reporting that help you understand the impact of your experiences
- Experiential Marketing Platforms increase bandwidth across the board, from on-site to final report presentations to your stakeholders.
- Customer Listening that opens the door to a two-way conversation with your audience. Take a look at an option for feedback and behavioral insight aggregation, Pinpoint:
The POPLIFE Story
In 2023, an artisanal mezcal brand collaborated with agency POPLIFE to develop and execute a best-in-class festival platform to introduce consumers to the wonderful world of mezcal.
Through activations at key festivals, like III Points (FL) and Portola (CA), the brand aimed to drive awareness, win over more brand champions, and get “liquid to lips” among target consumers in key markets,
The strategy went like this:
- They captured valuable insights from festival goers onsite – regardless of Wi-fi availability
- For the two days of each festival, the mezcal brand collected consumer data from festival goers – including demographics, contact information, insight into preferences and behaviors, and more.
- Festival goers were rewarded for sharing their info with festival-style branded swag, like LED rabbit ears and trucker hats as a value exchange with offline capabilities for better data standardization.
- Follow-up to gain a deeper understanding of consumers — After the festival, everyone who registered with the alcohol brand received a follow-up surveyThis allowed them to not only measure consumers’ sentiment about the activation but also gather deeper insights such as purchase history and intent.
- Measure the impact of the experience — POPLIFE could quickly surface trends and key metrics on event success to the stakeholders at the brand. The automated reporting meant they could understand success immediately and saved the POPLIFE team hours in analyzing data manually.
Brewery Learning Experience Example - Sierra Nevada
Delivering engaging and innovative experiences is the core of experiential marketing, but it has to be done in a way that resonates and is valued by your customers. Sometimes, you simply don’t know what you don’t know.
But you can always ask.
As customers become increasingly more attuned to traditional marketing and advertising, they’re also becoming increasingly demanding. Dedication to what your customers say and what drives their loyalty is vital.
ABL: Always be listening:
Don’t be afraid to ask the hard questions. Customer surveys have the power to reveal game-changing insights. When you keep an open mind, you hear what your attendees want and need from you.
No one can be perfect at every customer interaction, but knowing how your experiential efforts impact your brand will help you focus your resources in the right places.
The Sierra Nevada Story
Sierra Nevada is one of the largest American craft breweries with two locations in Chico, California, and Mills River, North Carolina. As a brand, Sierra Nevada has always prioritized the guest experience.
When the company broke ground at the Mills River site in 2012, they designed the location, operations, and experiences with a guest-centric approach that sees over one million guests annually.
The team had several objectives to keep in mind, including how to:
- Leverage and increase the impact of investment in guest experience.
- Engage a broad, multi-faceted audience to expand the Sierra Nevada brand.Provide various educational experiences, including free, paid, private, offline, and online events.
- Better understand the ~1M annual consumers who attendees experience at these popular breweries and the differences between the locations.
Using experiential marketing platform tech, Sierra Nevada learned key insights at both locations, now able to capture key information on guest demographics, habits, and levels of brand awareness on both coasts.
These insights mean the team can continually benchmark their locations and adjust programs at one or both breweries to grow the brand and keep visitors engaged.
Sierra Nevada was able to coordinate strategic tour planning; they found that paid tours result in higher guest satisfaction than free experiences. Using this information, they were able to schedule high-satisfaction experiences during peak visitor times, increasing visitors’ satisfaction with their experiences. They even learned that their customers valued tour diversity and consistency the most, which now helps inform tour programming and planning.
The Takeaway
We relate to each other on a whole different level today, especially as both brands and buyers have evolved. From each great experience example above, there’s a pattern in what success looks like:
- Personalization
- Listening to feedback
- Internal support
- Evergreen planning
- Planning for the unexpected
As we start seeing more and more brands evolve and embrace experiential marketing, these practices will become more commonplace. As marketers and leaders, we’re never satisfied with the common.
So create and innovate your branded experiences — blow us all away.
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