Experiential Marketing: Memorable Moments For Future Customers

What if, instead of chasing your customers, you created an experience that had your customers flocking to you?

In this episode of “How to Sell More,” host Mark Drager is joined by experiential marketing expert Brook Jay, the founder and CEO of All Terrain, an award-winning marketing agency renowned for its innovative brand strategies and activations. Her keen insights into consumer behaviour and exceptional storytelling abilities have allowed her to lead groundbreaking campaigns for global giants like Ferrari, Nike, and PepsiCo.  

In this episode, Brook shares insights on building emotional connections, standing out in crowded markets, and tracking the success of experiential marketing campaigns.

Versatility in Application: From live events and trade shows to in-store demonstrations and pop-up attractions, experiential marketing can take many forms. It’s about meeting consumers where they are and engaging them in memorable ways.

Authenticity and Value: Successful experiential marketing goes beyond a hard sales push. It focuses on providing value and building genuine emotional connections between the brand and the consumer.

Effective Incentives: Using incentives such as branded merchandise or exclusive offers can drive engagement and data collection, making measuring the campaign's success easier.

“Experiential marketing gives the consumer an opportunity to learn about a brand in a very nuanced way.”  -- Brook Jay

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Links to This Episode

• Apple Podcast
• Spotify
• YouTube
• Audible

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Key Takeaways

• Community Building - By creating engaging experiences, brands can foster a sense of community and loyalty among consumers, keeping the brand top-of-mind during the buying cycle.

• Content Generation - These experiences not only engage participants in real-time but also generate valuable content that can be repurposed for marketing across various platforms, from social media to email campaigns.

• Real-World Testing - Experiential marketing events act as real-time focus groups, providing brands with immediate insights into consumer reactions and preferences, which can be invaluable for refining marketing strategies.

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Top 3 Reasons to Listen

Keep Customers Engaged: Explore how experiential marketing can help build and sustain brand communities, keeping customers engaged and loyal over the long term.

Multi-Channel Integration: Learn how to seamlessly integrate experiential marketing with social media campaigns to create a cohesive and compelling brand narrative.

Successful Campaigns: Hear real-world examples of successful experiential marketing campaigns, including a unique pop-up event for Cheez-It and a racetrack event for Jaguar Land Rover.

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Follow Brook Jay on Social

Website: https://www.brookjay.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/allterrain/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/brook.jay.3/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brookjay/

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More About Today's Guest, Brook Jay

Founder and CEO of All Terrain, a brand strategy and activation powerhouse

Discover Brook Jay, a pioneering figure whose career spans diverse industries including CPG, luxury, entertainment, hospitality, and public relations. Renowned for her trailblazing approach to brand marketing, Brook has shaped All Terrain into the premier female-led, award-winning experiential marketing agency in the United States. With a client roster boasting global giants like Ferrari, Nike, and PepsiCo, Brook's profound understanding of consumer behavior and storytelling prowess consistently redefine brand activation, delivering exceptional results. As a Strategic Advisor, Brook empowers individuals and brands to craft resonant narratives that captivate audiences. She challenges industry norms by innovating in advertising and branded experiences, from orchestrating Ferrari's groundbreaking virtual launch to creating viral Cheez-It activations, continually pushing the boundaries of what's possible in brand engagement. Brook also shares her expertise on pivotal industry topics, including the complexities of measuring ROI in experiential marketing, the psychology behind building emotional connections through experiences, insights into the Hybrid Collective Model she pioneered at All Terrain, and the transformative power of integrating experiential marketing with digital strategies to create immersive brand experiences that drive lasting consumer connections and sales impact.

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A Transcription of The Talk

Mark Drager: So Brook, you have decades of experience in experiential marketing. And I've been working in the marketing space for a few years myself, but experiential, I feel like that could be, you know, live events, it could be trade shows, it could be private functions or mastermind groups, or hitting the streets. And really bringing in people into like, your new opening of your new location. And like, it could be anything because I almost don't know what it is. So help me and help the audience understand, in the world that you live in, what is experiential marketing.

Brook Jay: Well, experiential marketing is, at its ethos, creating a moment between a brand and a consumer and an emotional connection. So creating the experience, and could happen on social media, it could happen on an airplane, it could happen in a mall, it can happen at some of the biggest sporting events in the world, can tour around, it can happen in a dealership. Really, it is about showing up in stride with consumers and providing value without a really heavy sales push to it.

Mark Drager: Okay, so maybe that's why I feel like it can be anything because it can be. It can be anything that takes place anywhere. So then how do we bucket that down? Maybe to the different types of experiential marketing campaigns? And what might be most effective?

Brook Jay: Sure, well, everyday experiences that the everyday consumer has is you might go into a grocery store, and somebody may say, "Would you like to try this wine?" That is part of a technical aspect of experiential retail marketing, or shopper marketing, that falls somewhere in there, but it's still building an experience. When you go to a major sporting event, if you see a Chevy or a GM car at a baseball game, and you see people around it, and someone walks up to it and wants to have an exchange of value, which might be a t-shirt that's co-branded with the team, or the opportunity to walk around the car and learn a little bit more about it.

Brook Jay: It could be wild, unexpected moments like we just did in Joshua Tree for Cheez-It, the cheese brand, where something just pops up out of nowhere and becomes an attraction that is wildly in demand. You know, the idea is that you give the consumer an opportunity to learn about a brand in a very nuanced way.

Mark Drager: And so if I'm listening to this now, and I'm thinking, okay, you know, I'm always looking for a way to stand out in the crowd, I'm always looking for a way to give that extra experience, feeling, emotion, that interaction with my prospects. And I want to do it in a way that's more in-person, and not necessarily just like, you know, a Facebook advertising campaign or something. Then I need to go out into the streets, I need to go to the events, I need to create a space. How do you even approach this? Are most organizations coming to you and saying, "I want to rent this location for this night to look like this?" Or are they just coming to you with, "Help me, I want to make a bigger impact? What do I do?"

Brook Jay: Yeah, they're coming to us with a problem to solve or an opportunity. And that experience design might take place in a lot of different formats. So it could start in social through maybe an influencer campaign, then go into a live experience, and then back into social. And during that time, we've shot content that helps support the storytelling of the whole narrative of what we're trying to do for the client.

Brook Jay: So, you know, there's never one specific area of experiential. It has grown so much. We started this company 25 years ago, and it wasn't even a term—experiential. It was called brand activation, or, you know, sponsorship activation. And with the onset of social media, everything got upended again. So you can't really predict or just say that an experience is going to show up in the streets. It really is something that is about building an emotional connection between a brand and a consumer in an authentic way. And what that arena is could change based on what the product or what the initiative is.

Mark Drager: So that's, it's interesting. You mentioned that because you just reminded me that we did work for a few years with Jaguar Land Rover, and they would do these tours where they would rent racetracks, and private racetracks. They would invite all these different user groups in, so it might be AEO, or it might be YPO, or might be different people who they think might. I remember speaking to the president of Jaguar Land Rover, and they said, "We need a Jaguar in every driveway. And we need a Land Rover right beside it. You need the SUV."

Mark Drager: But they did these huge tours, which were amazing. Because they would set it all up and it was such a great wining and dining experience. And it gave such a great brand perception, and we would come in and shoot all the media for it. So it can be used for next year's event advertising, it can be used for social, it can be used at the Auto Show, it can be used for email, like just spin out the content as much as you can.

Mark Drager: But so when I think of that, and let's maybe frame our conversation that way, it's the idea that we as business owners have the opportunity to invite people into a world that we create, to experience something that's a little bit novel, a little bit different, kind of cool. And hopefully, in some way, I guess it supports our very ethos, like our culture, or our thinking, or processes, working with us. Are those essentially the steps?

Brook Jay: 100%. And that example you gave, we produce those kinds of events all the time for brands like GM and Ferrari. So the Jaguar example was a great one, because not everybody's buying a car, you know, every year, every day, like maybe CPG. So what Jaguar and Land Rover were doing right there was building community, keeping their community engaged, finding ways to stay top of mind during that buying cycle, and generating great content that helps share that from, you know, one-to-one to one-to-many. Experiential is very much about community development, as well as the storytelling aspect of the brands.

Mark Drager: And let's imagine now, I'm going to just keep peppering you with questions, and I love it. So let's imagine now that I have a sales, a national sales team or sales network, or I have a distribution network. Can experience marketing be kind of slightly shifted to not even thinking about the end customer, but maybe even the people in between ourselves and the end customer where we create experiences to bring in our dealer network, and our sales team and try to win them over as well?

Brook Jay: 100%. The B2B sales funnel can take great pages out of the B2C marketing initiatives in the fact that you still need to differentiate yourself as a product, and still keep your client engaged in the brand. And you still need to build an experience that makes them not want to go anywhere else. So it could be your SOPs, it could be that you guys throw the biggest and best convention parties, it could be the fact that you just have ritual behind the way your sales funnel works. And therefore you are people who have come to understand what it means, what is the experience of buying from you. So I think it's a very universal tactic that can be used in so many different sales cycles, in so many different marketing cycles.

Mark Drager: You're getting me so excited about this stuff now. Because as I'm thinking about it, we worked with a welding company once, that knew that people would fly into this huge event. But they didn't want to get space at the event. So they created an offsite welding kind of experience with like a bus and they were driving people in and out so that you could get them in their own environment. And basically, like, they kind of just hijacked the fact that people would be at the event to create their own event on the same day in the same city. And I was like, "This is amazing." So I'm just like, you're reminding me now of all these stories from my past.

Brook Jay: Yeah, you're very fluent in experiential marketing, Mark.

Mark Drager: I didn't even know that, hey. So obviously, this medium is going to have pros and cons like any medium. And so I want to be really transparent and honest about this. What are two or three of the pros, where experiential marketing will give you a tighter connection or better experience than maybe online, social, you know, one-on-one meetings, whatever it might be? And then equally, what are some of the challenges or cons that come along with this?

Brook Jay: Sure. So especially in a day and age where we're so locked into our phones, and into our computers and onto our screens, in general, really smart strategic experience design is the one thing that's going to break through the clutter immediately. It's going to build a genuine and authentic moment between you and your client, your consumer. And it's going to be a way to personalize the moment versus it being, you know, a big spray and pray kind of marketing initiative. It's the stickiest form of marketing in the fact that you can really track and meet somebody in an experience and track from the time they go to the point of purchase, which is something that, you know, experiential gets a bad rap on for not being able to track and measure it effectively. I mean, I can say so many good things about it. You can create a commercial out of a human experience that you have.

Brook Jay: So there's that one-to-one, one-to-many. So you create an experience for content that then becomes something that people have a FOMO moment about or any of that. It's a great place to get liquid to live search trial. And really, it's a focus group moment for brands to really understand how their end target user is going to react to the brand. And then another opportunity is what the most authentic storytelling is when people take your brand story and share it with the world in their own words. That's where I'm really listening. Now, when somebody who I find influential or interesting is talking about a brand new brand experience, it's not coming directly from the brand. Now you've got, you know, Fred. And a lot of that comes out of experiential.

Mark Drager: So just real quick, though, it's interesting to me because as you're speaking, I'm thinking about a lot of the projects we've done in the past, whereas a creative agency, as a branding agency, as a strategy agency, we would spend an incredible amount of time and thought, and, frankly, client budget, to create an atmosphere, a set, a place, whatever you might want to call it, an environment where we can go out and shoot content, and it's all manufactured. And it's all under our control, and it's all tightened up. But we would spend all of this time and energy to do it. And as you're speaking, I'm thinking, you know, what, the other times where we could go out and create the environment, and it's totally artificial to go make content. Or you could create a real environment with real people with real experiences, and then bring someone like us in to happen to capture that. And it's the same amount of work. And if it's the same amount of effort, and frankly, it might even be more budget to do it our way than your way, why wouldn't you put all that time and effort into the benefit of maybe doing, you know, sweepstakes, or making it feel exclusive, or do people use sweepstakes anymore is that to term contests. You know, like, make it a contest, or make it a special invite, or elevate it to a status thing, and then create this great atmosphere in this great event and bring everyone in, let them experience it, let them share it on social media, and then capture it and spin it out later, the way that you're describing. Rather than put all of this time money and effort into something that's brought together just for the purpose of spitting it out later, you're missing a whole bunch of opportunities along the way, aren't you?

Brook Jay: Yeah, I think, listen, this is where with a smart digital campaign, and a smart social media strategy. You know, combined with an immersive moment like this to your point, it's going to create this live connection, it's going to drive sales, it's going to build and deepen the relationship between you and your audience. So, you know, it should always be in the marketing mix. It doesn't have to cost millions of dollars.

Mark Drager: I'm glad you said that because I wasn't thinking it was gonna cost millions.

Brook Jay: No, it shouldn't have to, not always. Big brand moments, like the Super Bowl and some of the big things you see that people connect to—big, big experiential—those are, you know, multi, multi-million dollar moments. But some of the smartest and most successful things have cost us under $100,000.

Mark Drager: And so I wanted to jump in real quick and get to a few of the cons. What would be some of the drawbacks to experiential marketing, which I imagine can be supplemented, again, with smart social strategies? If you do a full, holistic approach, you're going to cover these off. But just the bucket of experiential, what does it not do very well?

Brook Jay: You know, I think that live experiences have a human element to them, right? You don't have, to your point, you can't cut and restart. So there are components of weather, there are components of the human factor that, you know, there's the fact that technology can go down. There are all the factors, just like being on a movie set where something could go awry. It's the same challenges when you're doing larger-scale experiential, big, big moments like that.

Brook Jay: What I love about the cons element and the way All Terrain works, is that we make our campaigns, especially if they're long-tail, like big tours, we have the ability to pivot really quickly on language that might not be working. What might have worked in Miami might not be working in Mobile, Alabama. So we have the ability to pivot and move quickly to update the environment when those challenges arise. You really can't do that when you spend a ton of money on a big commercial and just hope that the message lands. We have the ability to augment talk points and even the look and feel of an experience as we move it through the world. So we can find out the hard way that something is not working, but we can also change in real-time, overcoming challenges pretty quickly.

Mark Drager: And you know what, I think anyone who's listening who spends any time with selling understands the value of that rapid iteration. When you're at an event, when you're having your intro meetings, when you're speaking to someone and you're working through new messaging, or new targeting, or even developing a new offer, just the more you can get it under your belt and practice and see the reactions of the people you're speaking to, the tighter and better it's going to be. That is a great point about the fact that over time, the event is going to tighten up and the people are going to get sharper and smarter and better. The experience is going to get sharper and smarter and better as you go along as well, right?

Brook Jay: Yeah, and when you draw the line to great salespeople, and great experience, and that redundancy. You know, what we do, we find ourselves in front of people 365 days a year. We are cultural anthropologists; we know what people will react to, and we understand what they will run screaming from. So understanding and practicing your pitch, being in the sales world, which is what we're doing, we are generally the front line for a brand. We are selling, but doing a soft sell in a way that really invites you in where the consumer is chasing us, rather than we're chasing them. And that's when it's done right. A good salesperson also has the capacity to make people just want to work with you. Because you've really been able to finesse the talking points, the delivery, and the understanding of the end user. So, you know, there's a lot of great connectivity between what you do at SalesLoop and what we do every day at All Terrain.

Mark Drager: So you mentioned the fact that it gets a bad rap in terms of attribution models, being able to attribute a lead source to a sale. And so I know one of the biggest pushbacks I've gotten from clients in the past who do live events is the challenge of measuring ROI, the challenge of measuring effectiveness, the challenge of tracking back lead source. I mean, I've gone as far to tell some of our clients, like, listen, if you're really this worried about it, bring on a staff member, and bring on a little clicker, and count how many people are coming by your booth and how many people are speaking to you. Collect their information on a tablet with a really great offer to get it. And now you have impression count, you have conversation count, which is almost like a click for those who are online, and then you have the email capture. Like, it's not that complicated, we can figure out ways to make this happen. In the past, we used to work with a mattress company that sold mattresses, and every time you walked in, the buzzer would go off because they counted how many people came into the store so they could count everything. We had to load all this stuff in, and the sales manager was getting really upset because we kept opening and closing the door and we were throwing his numbers off. So like, listen, this has all been solved in the past. It's not that hard. But how do you go about ensuring that ROI can be measured back and that these campaigns can be proven effective?

Brook Jay: You know, it's such a great question because many experiential campaigns have narrow KPIs. They're like social media impressions, earned media, which makes it really hard to track directly back to sales. But the solution that we found early on in our career, or in our tenure, is that both the sales and marketing teams need to be at the table and working in lockstep with the agency teams. And this happens way less than you would think it would. But when it does, you can track from the time you meet a consumer at an experience, and straight through the point of sale. We've been instituting these tactics very early on in our company's history. We really honed our best practices with our work with GM.

Brook Jay: So we were brought on to manage all their major league sponsorships—baseball, hockey, football, golf—and we basically brought the showrooms out to the masses in their everyday lives on behalf of GM's divisions, like in every region of the US, covering over 55 major markets. Through management of most of these major league sports and lifestyle events, we developed this three-step process: design a compelling activation footprint to get people to come to us, have an anchor element like great premiums (premiums are like flies to honey), and if you have a big sports fan and you've got an Angels t-shirt that looks really cool and it's got a Chevy logo on the back, they want it. They're willing to stand there, talk to our team, do a walk-around, talk about their buying horizon, and give us their data. Our teams are really well-honed to talk. If it's a parent, we're going to talk about safety. If it's a young guy like you, Mark, we're going to talk about the speed.

Mark Drager: I appreciate that you think that I'm that young, but I'm a father of four with a daughter going off to college next year. I want a nice, safe, economical vehicle for her to drive around in.

Brook Jay: We train on social and emotional intelligence for our brand ambassadors. We talk about what's going to be important to the person you're talking to and how you get that dwell time to extend while you're on the footprint. And then from there, we provide an incentive to go to the dealership, so it's like a gift card of some sort, you know, and it's only activated when you go to the dealership. So now we've got that point.

Brook Jay: At the dealership, we see when the card gets activated. And then from there, the dealership groups report back to GM and their agencies what sales occurred through those promotional streams. And that, for us, we were selling over $120 million worth of vehicles directly attributed to our sales annually through All Terrain programs as we've worked with them throughout the years. So taking that kind of lockstep approach, we have been able to implement that into other industries, not all of them, but a good deal of them.

Mark Drager: So let's play a game. Are you cool playing a quick game? I want to give the audience a sense of because this might sound interesting, it might sound very cool, but I want to ensure that we break this down because I believe that no matter the level of your business, that experience really matters. And being able to form connections, we've talked a lot about this on the podcast, with AI, with the mass lot of content that is out there, standing out, and being different, and creating great relationships is going to become more and more valuable as fewer people do it.

Mark Drager: So let's imagine that I'm a Senior Principal, I'm a partner in an engineering firm or an architectural and engineering firm. And we work with building these amazing office buildings or these malls. Or, you know, anyone who's in engineering is like, "Mark, what are you talking about? You're making a--"

Brook Jay: Client avatar.

Mark Drager: Well, let's imagine that I'm a professional services firm. And I spend all day every day doing really smart, great work for my clients. And we're specialists. I think I want to do something for my... I want to do a win-back campaign. You know, I have all these clients that we worked with in the past, we haven't had a chance to connect with them in a long time, and I need a reason to reconnect with them. What would be the first few questions you'd be asking me? What do I need to tell you? What do I need to know to be able to see if this is something I can pull off?

Brook Jay: Well, first, everything we can know about the brand, you know, relevant branding documentation, anything that has to do with your brand's story. Obviously, setting up program objectives immediately, like who's the target audience? Goals? If it's winning clients back, you know, how are we going to track that? And what's our role inside of that? What specifically do you want from us to support that? Key markets, timing, really going deep on the emotional relevancy of the target audience. It really helps us understand who we're talking to. What's going to matter to them? Any insights that you might have, or a POV on them?

Mark Drager: Do I write a brief on all of this stuff that you guys would meet with me? And you'd brainstorm? And you'd pull it out of me? And like, what do I need to bring to you?

Brook Jay: Okay, so most of our clients are big, big Fortune 100, Fortune 500 companies, and so they, they're well versed in the brief. But for mid-level companies that aren't doing this on the regular, a good agency should be able to pull these briefs. We have a brief format that we'll bring to the table. We need to talk about creative imperatives and competitive situations, we're going to ask you a little bit about that. What are your current challenges? What's the gold standard? If somebody else you've seen do this, you know, give us an example of something that really blew your mind or you really found to be that they received a great deal of reward from it. And what's the budget? Oh, is this the budget?

Mark Drager: Of course. What's the goal? What's the timeline? What's the budget? Okay, fantastic. So this is why I wanted to get a little bit into the weeds on this because what I find interesting is, so really great focus on goals, on business drivers, brand story, emotion, who you're looking to connect with, what you're looking to get out of them. It's almost as if, you know, I think listener, you can imagine this as a story you're trying to tell someone. And if you think about the story or the experience, the story that you're trying to tell to someone, there's going to be some ups, there's going to be some downs. There's going to be like, it's not told like you're reading a textbook. This is not something that is meant to be operational. This is meant to be something that is emotional. Really, right? We're looking to make emotional connections with real people.

Mark Drager: Yes, this is not about just checking some boxes and making it happen. Does that tend to, and of course not the corporate 100, not the brand managers who focus on this type of stuff all the time, but your mid-level clients, does that worry them or scare them almost because it's a little less tangible than just a digital marketing campaign?

Brook Jay: I think there's a lot of confusion about how to tell your story and where to tell your story with all kinds of people in general. But you know, with a mid-level client like that, mid-level size business, I don't know if it worries them if they're very confident in their ownership of their space in the industry. I think what I find is that a lot of people have a million stories they want to tell you about how great they are, what makes them different, and why they should be number one instead of number seven, or whatever it is in their, hierarchy of their industry. I think it's just getting in the right swim lane, figuring out how to tell the story and where to tell the story. And what cadence to tell the story. Those are the things that I think keep CEOs and sales-level executives up at night is like, how do I break through the clutter and get noticed, which is something you brought up earlier? And what channels do I use to get there?

Mark Drager: Amazing. I've been speaking with Brook Jay, who's the founder and CEO of the collective called All Terrain. Final question for you, Brook. If you gave us just one tip or one strategy to sell more, what would that be?

Brook Jay: Authenticity. I feel like it's becoming an abused word. But ultimately, people want to buy from authentic people or brands that stand up for value and it's getting more and more important in this day and age than ever. And so I think coming at it from a place of true authenticity and what value you are providing, being a go-giver in those moments, is really what's going to help people become better salespeople and get the attention of their clients quicker.

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