Verena Dauerer, who is a member of the Heartbeats Movement, divides her time between Tokyo and Berlin. She works as an editor at the intersection of technology with design/art/fashion/film. She is also freelancing for the Japan Times and BBC Radio. Read about the latest marketing trends in Tokyo, the Japanese ‘keitai’, innovative and memorable campaigns from 2010, and much more.
Get your copy of Heartbeats Trend Report : Tokyo
Brands offering direct and authentic experiences are more likely to create deeper and more meaningful relationships with their customers than brands that don’t.
In order to feel important, understood and connected today, people need meaningful and memorable experiences. A recent consumer survey in UK showed that people’s brand recall of an experience is 60%, while for newspapers only 30% and for TV almost as low as 20%. As more companies start to understand the importance of producing cultural capital, authentic brand experiences are becoming increasingly important in order for brands to connect deeper with their customers and get the desired customer attention. To be effective, the experience of a brand has to be rooted in the story the company tells, and appeal to as many of the human senses – i.e. sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste – as possible, and the more meaningful the experience is, the more cultural capital will be associated with it.
Brands with the ‘fingerspitzgefühl’ of navigating between culture and commerce and direct authentic experiences, will be able to create a deeper and more meaningful relationship to their customers, and more easily succeed in building brand advocacy. Most good experiences tell stories, and a good brand experience makes customers feel closer to the brand. Greater customer loyalty is developed due to the emotional bond, established through the experience. Customers are also willing to pay more for products from brands providing them with meaningful brand experiences.
Today, we can also see more brands that have started to approach experiences in a more strategic way. Above you can watch intros for T-Mobile’s Electronic Beats Festival, and Intel’s Creators Project, a project that will be presented in a case study later on in this series about the four Es of emotions, experiences, engagement and exclusivity.
A recent study on twins by Nokia and professor Adrian North reveals that 50% of our musical taste is predetermined. Watch this!
“With our music strategy we wanted to cut through the clutter and engage people on their terms, and this is exactly what we have done with the Beat show,” says Penny Welch, sponsorship manager for Samsung UK.
3.2 million video views in one month. A pretty impressive figure I must say and it once again shows the effect music branding has on social media networks.
