What is a brand activation?
A brand activation is the process of bringing your brand to life through the use of events, marketing campaigns, and various other strategies. It utilises all of the elements of your brand, from the actual logo and colour palette, through to your brand tone and persona to create an in-person event or experience for your brand followers and fans to experience.
The goal of a brand activation is to engage your guests and customers and get them interacting, understanding, and believing in your brand. The goal is to convert them from just people who have heard of the brand to true, hard-core, passionate customers who scream your brand from the rooftops.
Brand activations can be achieved through experiential marketing, social media strategies, influencer campaigns and, of course, events, which have the advantage of leveraging all three in one event campaign.
Benefits of a brand activation
The benefits really depend on the brand itself, the industry it is in, as well as the type of activation that takes place.
The main benefit of a brand activation, though, is to convert followers of the brand to die-hard loyal fans.
Build Brand Awareness
Any brand activation is going to create a buzz around the brand, both for current fans, and new customers. It’s a chance to get people talking about your brand from a new point of view and get everyone excited about something new and exciting.
User Generated Content
The best form of content these days is user-generated content. This is content created by your own users, customers and fans. Interactive and interesting brand activations are a great way to get your own customers taking photos and videos of themselves and their friends using your product, and sharing it on their own socials.
There is no better advertisement than word of mouth! You can get creative in ways to leverage this throughout a brand activation by creating campaigns and competitions for your customers to win things just by sharing and tagging on their socials.
A great example of this is the Starbucks Sparkle shop in Canada, which launched its new range of carbonated drinks. The brand leveraged the bubbles in the drinks and tied them into sparkles, opening the store and partnering with a glitter-loving influencer to promote it.
Increase customer engagement
In an incredibly competitive market of 2024, where we as consumers are being torn in all directions when it comes to marketing, it’s incredibly difficult to know where to look, and even more difficult for those in the marketing world to get our attention and more importantly hold onto it for more than a few seconds.
There is so much noise we see and hear every single day. We hear it on the radio, we see it on billboards, we scroll it online, and we’re told it by our friends, and of course, the list just keeps going.
Brand activations are a way to cut through that noise and get your customers focusing on you, and you alone. Physical events allow for you to gather an engagement audience that isn’t being pulled in all directions. It’s your brand, and they’re only looking at your brand for the duration they’re at the activation.
Fashion brand Petal and Pup did an incredible brand activation in 2023 launching their new fashion line collaboration with Georgie Stevenson, in a micro event. With only 15 attendees, the event saw the brand tagged in only 16 posts, but the 16 posts reached a combined audience of 728,000 people!
Loyal Brand Fans
Think about yourself personally, are you more likely to buy from something that you’ve only ever seen a few posts online and an autogenerated welcome email in a long sequence? Or are you more likely to buy from a brand you have attended an event of? Felt the product, used the product, smelt the product, spoken to the team?
In fact, a study by Event Track in 2019, found that 98% of users felt more inclined to purchase a product after attending an activation. Need I say anymore?
Sales and more sales!
With customers more engaged, more loyal, and more likely to purchase, an activation is a great opportunity to get your product into the hands of customers quickly.
You can strike while the iron is hot and sell right there during the activation.
Capitalise on the new customer base, and re-engaged audience by continuing your activation in-store for those in the local geographic area. The sales don’t have to stop when the activation does.
In fact, Shopify has found that 75% of consumers will shop in a store that has a brand activation going on, and 93% are likely to make repeat purchases in the future.
Dunkin Donuts increased their sales in 2020 by bringing the donuts to the fans in their branded RV giveaway to launch their new iced beverages range. What better way to launch cold drinks, then taking them to the hot people on the beach!
Customer Insights
Activations are a very rare time for brands, it’s not often you will find a room full of your customers, all excited and ready to hear about your latest and greatest product!
This is a great time for you to chat to them, and get live in person and invaluable feedback on your product. Find out what they love and don’t love about the event, see what your own customers gravitate towards, and what puts them off.
Test brand messaging right there and then, with immediate results, for your marketing team to review, pivot and retest in real-time.
It’s the best review group you’ll ever get!
What are you waiting for? When done well and with the right strategy in place, a brand activation event can elevate your brand to the next level, increasing brand awareness and sales along the way.
One thing you can guarantee, is that by not using brand activations to grow your brand, you’re making sure that you’re left behind by all of your competitors who are!
If you’re not sure if a brand activation or corporate event can help your brand, or maybe aren’t sure how to get started, be sure to reach out! This is our jam, and we love helping clients bring their brands to life!! Contact us and find out some more!