This is a guest post by Sarah Hill, professional blogger and Marketing Manager at Group7Events based in London.
Any company looking to get ahead in its respective industry knows the importance of portraying its brand in a positive way. This can be achieved in multiple ways, but one of the more promising and growingly popular approaches has been to use brand activations to enhance a brand’s visibility and positive associations among the target audience and beyond.
But what is brand activation?
To put it shortly, it is a process of using experiences or interactions with a target audience to form positive and personal connections with the brand. This is a very common tactic used by brands that are trying to enter a market that does not have any prior experiences with the brand.
For instance, a car manufacturer entering the U.S. market would probably use extensive experiential events, ad campaigns, and consumer engagement tactics in order to become more visible and carve out a market share by defining the brand in a way that part of the market can associate with.
But how can brand activation help enhance a brand?
There are more different aspects that go into a successful brand activation event, and more than plenty of potential benefits that can arise from it.
The most obvious and prominent benefit of successfully organized brand activations are the aforementioned personal connections that can be formed with the target audience. Tying in the brand with a unique experience and even a certain lifestyle or belief system is something that can go a very long way in carving out a market share that is almost unmovable.
Coca Cola is a great example of this – the company’s very effective brand activation strategy has led them to becoming associated with young, cool people just having a good time. This is an association that a lot of brands would love to (and try hard to) form.
Another way brand activation, coupled with effective event production and theming, can increase brand awareness is by garnering media attention that comes from unique and intriguing brand activation events or campaigns. This is quite difficult to do, but if executed properly, it can create a ripple effect that will open new marketing possibilities for the brand.
Finally, the interaction with an audience can be very beneficial to the brand as well – a tremendous amount of data can be collected and analyzed from the way a certain market reacts to brand activations.
This leads to a better understanding of the market in question and can result in a tremendous advantage over the competition. Not only does a brand become more visible and prominent in the eyes of the target audience, but the company itself can learn a lot about their audience, and use that information to make their product, marketing or simply the conversation even more refined, which, in the end, results in a significant increase in the bottom line.
Summary:
Brand activation has for decades been an integral part of any company that aspires to be more than a small player in the market.
The effectiveness of brand activation comes down to the possibilities of engaging the audience, ability of a good campaign to create a huge ripple effect in the media and the tremendous amount of input that can be gathered from the target audience and used to refine the marketing approach.
In fact, there’s a lot of benefits from brand activation not only for traditional businesses, but even for people in the events industry, such as concert managers, conference planners or meeting planners – all of these can use their own events to engage audiences and form strong connections between certain experiences and their brand, which can be incredibly effective in quickly making them an authority in the field.
Author Bio:
Sarah Hill is a professional blogger and creative content writer. She works as a
Marketing Manager @Group Se7en Events.
Group Se7en Events are leading events planners in London & conference organisers, delivering global meeting and free venue finding service.
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