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Experiential Marketing : How to Get Customers to Sense, Feel, Think, Act, and Relate to Your Company and Brands
Release Date: 1999-08
Average Customer Rating:
List Price: $28.00
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Product Description
Engaging, enlightening, provocative, and sensational are the words people use to describe compelling experiences and these words also describe this extraordinary book by Bernd Schmitt. Moving beyond traditional "features-and-benefits" marketing, Schmitt presents a revolutionary approach to marketing for the branding and information age. Schmitt shows how managers can create holistic experiences for their customers through brands that provide sensory, affective, and creative associations as well as lifestyle marketing and social identity campaigns. In this masterful handbook of tools and techniques, Schmitt presents a battery of business cases to show how cutting-edge companies use "experience providers" such as visual identity, communication, product presence, Web sites, and service to create different types of customer experiences. To illustrate the essential concepts and frameworks of experiential marketing, Schmitt provides:
SENSE cases on Nokia mobile phones, Hennessy cognac, and Procter & Gamble's Tide Mountain Fresh detergent;
FEEL cases on Hallmark, Campbell's Soup, and Häagen Dazs Cafés in Asia, Europe, and the United States; THINK cases on Apple Computer's revival, Genesis ElderCare, and Siemens; ACT cases on Gillette's Mach3, the Milk Mustache campaign, and Martha Stewart Living; RELATE cases on Harley-Davidson, Tommy Hilfiger, and Wonderbra. Using the New Beetle and Sony as examples, Schmitt discusses the strategic and implementation intricacies of creating holistic experiences for customers. In an intriguing final chapter, he presents turn-around techniques such as "Objective: To Dream," "Send in the Iconoclasts," and "Quit the Bull," to show how traditional marketing firms can transform themselves into experience-oriented organizations. This book will forever change your perception of customers, marketing, and brands -- from Amtrak and Singapore Airlines to Herbal Essences products and Gwyneth Paltrow.
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Amazon.com Review
Experiential marketing, a decidedly turn-of-the-millennium form of corporate persuasion that strives to elicit a powerful sensory or cognitive consumer response, is rapidly superseding the stodgy features-and-benefits approach generally in vogue since the gray-flannel '50s. In fact, says Bernd H. Schmitt, a professor of marketing and director of the Center on Global Brand Management at Columbia Business School, leading enterprises ranging from Gillette and Martha Stewart to Amtrak and Oprah Winfrey are already using such emotionally loaded techniques successfully to develop new products, communicate with customers, create business partnerships, build innovative cyberspace and brick-and-mortar sales outlets, and boost profits. Experiential Marketing presents Schmitt's insightful and thought-provoking examination of this growing trend, along with a series of suggestions (for example, how to create an "us vs. them" atmosphere) for implementing similar efforts. By dissecting a series of relevant campaigns undertaken at the leading-edge firms mentioned above, along with those at other major players such as Harley-Davidson, Volkswagen, Celestial Seasonings, and Taster's Choice, Schmitt demonstrates its effectiveness while deftly pointing out salient techniques that readers might adopt. --Howard Rothman
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 Very disappointed ( chutchison7 )
With a title like Experiential Marketing, I thought the book would practice what it preached. Instead it took an exciting subject and made elementary points dull and uninspiring.
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Resonating and Relevant
Experiential Marketing strives to make its case that it's important to relate to customers on an emotional basis. Given how much the decision-making process is linked to emotions and not just sheer logic, Schmitt makes a powerful argument that customers need to feel an emotional connection to the company they purchase from. Schmitt does an excellent job of writing a fascinating piece that is sure to help take marketing into the next step. It's as good as Guerilla PR: Wired, which explores how to use that same emotional connection via the Internet and other technological methods.
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Old & Obvious News
From the perspective of someone who works intimately with major consumer brands, this book was a huge disappointment. There is absolutely nothing new here, as should be evident when most of the approaches held up as paragons of experiential marketing are 5-15 years old. Schmitt acts as though moving past "features and benefits" advertising is a new and controversial idea, when in fact marketing to people's emotions and aspirations has been accepted practice for at least 15 years. Is academia (Schmitt being a professor, not a practicioner) that far behind what has actually been going on in marketing departments and advertising agencies for so long?Not to mention that every possible brand tactic under the sun can fall under the wide umbrella of "experiential marketing" -- and Schmitt attempts to make examples from virtually any good marketing idea of the last decade in a cluttered and undisciplined format. I guess I wouldn't be so peeved if I were brand new to the world of mass marketing, and maybe this book wouldn't be such old news. But even for the neophyte, it's nothing more than a collection of neat marketing ideas with little of a distinct theme to hold them together. If you want to read about accepted marketing tactics of top brands, it's an OK read, but those examples are all around us anyway. If you want to learn how these ideas originated or how you can think about your brand in a new way, it's of no help.
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Frog dissection in marketing ( info18118 )
My associate bought this book, read it and gave it to me to review (at the site of my school of ad-vertising and marketing I run a book review section). He was amazed and disappointed. And so was I.THE NAME - What does the name "EXPERIMENTAL Marketing" suggest to an average practi-tioner of the trade? I've tested it on a dozen of businessmen and students of marketing and they were all unanimous - the name suggests staging experiments in marketing. (This accounted by the way for the decision of my associate to buy the book.) As a matter of interest, the name has been translated into Russian as "empirical" marketing, perhaps because the Russian editors found out that the book has nothing to do with experimentation. By the way, there is another book "Experimental marketing", by E. J. Davis. What's it about? SUBHEADING (How to Get Customers to SENSE, FEEL, THINK, ACT and RELATE to Your Company and Brands) - Behold, vendors of nuts, bolts, bricks, furniture, hardware, apparel, station-ery, and of millions of other mundane, commoditized products. If your customers can neither sense, nor feel, nor think, nor act, nor "relate," this is a book for you. A minor point of grammar - what's it to "sense to your company," "to feel to your company," etc.? TRADITIONAL MARKETING - The author arrogantly dismisses the so-called traditional mar-keting: "The history of all hitherto existing marketing is the history of functional features and bene-fits. Advertiser and audience, seller and buyer, strategist and client - in a word, marketer and cus-tomer--stood in constant opposition to one another, a fight that each time ended without any deliv-ery of true value." Really? According to Prof. Schmitt, traditional marketers, those nitwits, view consumers as rationally think-ing robots. For instance, a buyer of lipstick is allegedly concerned solely with its chemical formula. (We'll have to excuse the marketing ignorance of psychologist Schmitt - he hasn't heard of Revlon's famous motto "In the factory we make cosmetics; in the drugstore we sell hope." ) Schmitt: "Let the traditional marketers tremble at the experiential marketing revolution." If we want to continue in one piece, we should scrap the old-fashioned ideas of meeting a client's needs, how-ever sophisticated and subconscious (see Maslow pyramid), customer satisfaction, "outside-in think-ing" (Trout), partnersell, WIN-WIN, platinum rule, and a host of other time-tested "US-made" marketing wisdoms? We must concentrate on how to entertain a harassed housewife in a supermar-ket - previously she was mostly locating on the shelves her habitual products and mechanically put-ting them into her cart. Now we must expose her to a wide spectrum of "consumer experiences." RESOLUTIONIST - "We are in the middle of a revolution. A revolution that will render the prin-ciples and models of traditional marketing obsolete. A revolution that will change the face of mar-keting forever. A revolution that will replace traditional feature-and-benefit marketing with experien-tial marketing." A new Marx prophesies: "A spectre is haunting the marketplace - the spectre of ex-periential marketing." FROG DISSECTION - "Experiences may be dissected into different types, each with their own inherent structures and processes." And so are marketings: the SENSE marketing is not to be con-fused with, say, THINK marketing. I admire that military style thinking - if your drill sergeant (say, Prof. Schmitt) tells you that yours is SENSE marketing, stick to it. And don't THINK or, God for-bid, RELATE - VERBOTEN!!! In the conformable world of Prof. Schmitt's "strategic experiential modules (SEMs)" everything is clear and convenient, everything has its slot, everything takes care of itself. And... "The customers have nothing to lose but their boredom. They have a world of experiences to win." Needless to say, that prodigy of revolutionary thinking is being received with much acclaim. However amidst much official appraise one finds on Prof. Schmitt's site his condescending reference to those who are too stupid to be converted: "The old school of marketing makes its retort against Experiential Marketing, Schmitt, and everything he stands for... I am sorry to say, I found myself rather subscribing to the opinion of those "stone-age marketers" and wondering at the origins of the acclaims.
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 "A New Model" ( mach1936 )
In Marketing Aesthetics, Schmitt & Simonson argue that "most of marketing is limited because of its focus on features and benefits." They then presented what they characterized as "a framework" for managing those experiences. In Experiential Marketing, Schmitt provides a much more detailed exposition of the limitations of traditional features-and-benefits marketing. Moreover, he moves beyond the sensory "framework" into several new dimensions, introducing what he calls "a new model" which will enable marketers to manage "all types of experiences, integrating them into holistic experiences" while "addressing key structural, strategic, and organizational challenges." The key word is "holistic"; the key process is IssuesEpilogue In his Preface, Schmitt introduces his reader to someone he identifies as "Laura Brown." At the end of each of the 11 chapters, Laura Brown reacts to the material presented. Often, she responds with questions which the reader may be tempted to ask. For products but what if a company is an industrial firm? What if it is a consulting firm or a medical practice? How does experiential marketing come into play for these kinds of companies?" Or at the end of Chapter via a brand? What kind of communities are the 'brand communities'? What about communities of real people?" Obviously Schmitt is a clever fellow. He includes Laura Brown (who turns out to be a real person) to respond to his material with questions such as these so that, in effect, he can say "I am so glad that you asked me about that!" Of course, he then answers the questions. This interaction is playful, adding humor; it is also a brilliant device by which to expand and enrich the flow of Schmitt's ideas. They are very important ideas indeed. Simultaneously, Schmitt establishes a rock-solid conceptual infrastructure while examining a number of different companies (eg Nokia, Procter & Gamble, Apple Computer, Volkswagen, Siemens, Martha Stewart Living, and SONY) which demonstrate the fundamental principles of Experiential Marketing. One of the book's most valuable contributions is provided in Part Two as Schmitt focuses on what he calls Strategic Experiential Modules (SEMs), each of which has its own distinct structures and principles which must be understood by each manager. SEMs include sensory experiences (SENSE), affective experiences (FEEL), creative cognitive experiences (THINK), physical experiences and entire lifestyles (ACT), and social-identity experiences (RELATE). Schmitt examines each, explains how to achieve the effective integration of all four. In the Epilogue, he reveals Laura Brown's identity (no surprise there), suggesting that the experience-oriented organization is a "Dionysian organization and focuses on creativity and innovation...it takes a broad, helicopter view focusing on long-term trends, pays attention to its physical environment, and views its employees as human capital." Indeed, he hastens to add, "the experience-oriented organization is keenly interested in promoting its employees' experiential growth." Schmitt thus offers an alternative to the traditional organization which is oriented toward order, structure, analysis, and short term. If you read Experiential Marketing and then share my high regard for it, I urge you to read also (if you have not already done so) The Experience Economy and The Entertainment Economy.
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