What Are Brand Activations?
Brand activations are experiences or events that are organised by brands with the purpose of advertising their product. The ultimate goal of brand activation is to attract, engage, and motivate customers to purchase by creating better connections with consumers.
Brand Activation Types
- Experimental Marketing: Creating an engaging experience at the point of purchase for consumers. E.g. pop-up stores or allowing consumers to use the product
- Social Media Engagement: They are used to drive engagement, brand awareness and generate buzz.
- In-Store Retail Brand Activation: Use stores to interact with customers in unique, creative and interesting ways.
- Pop-Up Store: They are great to engage social media users and create buzz around the brand or particular product.
- Product Sampling: Consumers stated that interaction with the brand made them 74% more likely to purchase their products and solidified the relationship with the brand.
- Digital marketing: Allow you to interact with the consumer beyond physical places. They provide consumer data for their feedback on what they like and not.
These brand activation types or a combination of them can be very successful in getting your brand out there.
Why Brand Activations Work
- Encourage impulse purchases
- Its subtle advertising: It uses a soft sell approach. This means it doesn’t appear as much to consumers to be advertising and they are less likely to ignore it.
- Makes your brand stand out
- Increases brand awareness
- Customers love them
So now that we’ve probably convince you that brand activations are essential in the modern world, let’s talk about making a GREAT one:
1. Make Your Brand Activations Interactive
You can use technology to your advantage. Make more interesting and engaging experiences with it that consumers will be excited to try. Cool ways of using technologies will also help your brand expand and reach new audiences. Meeting the customer online and off-line ensure you are satisfying consumers at all points of purchase and also increasing reach.
2. Define Your Goal
Goals are the most important aspect in order to give your brand activation direction. Having a goal will help you in the idea generation process and coming up with ideas that will solve solutions for your brand. Goals can be things such as:
- Increase customer loyalty
- Increase brand awareness
- Launch your brand
- User sign ups
- Social media engagement/buzz
3. Customer Insights
This will help you create a brand activation meant for your audience which will lead to your goals being achieved better. Consider how your audience can benefit from the interaction and why they would want to interact with it in the first place.
Use what you know about your audience to surprise them, spark emotion and make their aspirations come true. It will help you become a more memorable and positive brand experience in consumers’ minds.
When coming up with ideas it’s also important to consider customers’ problems or concerns. What problems can you solve for them? It will help you create more positive brand recall. This could be done by addressing consumer reservations or issues.
4. Make Your Brand Activations Shareable And Trendy
Taking advantage of trends opens up the possibility of reaching a larger audience:
- Use trending hashtags
- Make it fun and relatable
- Use algorithms to be more visible
One reservation with trends is to ensure you don’t blend in with other participants. Be creative and worth sharing
Make your activation worth sharing. If your activation is great, people will want to talk about it and spread the word. Make it easy to share it or create giveaways.
Partner with other brands and or influencers as you will also be attracting their audience and it’s more likely to spread. Audiences admire influencers which will lead to a chain of events where consumers copy influencers and showcase it, spreading your product or service.
5. Hire a Professional
Activation professionals have all of the skills and knowledge to make your activations stand out. At Dot. Design we are highly experienced in creating events, pop-ups executions, POS, custom signage and more. We are able to bring you activation ideas alive in the best way possible.
Examples Of Our Brand Activations
