5 Experiential Marketing Examples That Changed Brand Perception

By: David Botbol October 20, 2020 5 min read

Experiential marketing focuses less on a single product and more on a brand’s message, built around active, in-person engagement. The goal is an emotional connection that turns a one-time interaction into a lasting relationship. The best campaigns do more than sell: they change how people see the brand entirely.

Almost every company uses interactive marketing in some form, but a handful of campaigns stand out for reshaping public perception. The five experiential marketing examples below did exactly that, using memorable, senses-first experiences to win over new audiences and deepen loyalty with existing ones. Each one offers a lesson any brand can apply.

Key Takeaways

Experiential marketing sells a message, not just a product: The strongest campaigns build an emotional connection around what a brand stands for, which is what actually shifts perception.
A bold idea outperforms a big logo: Red Bull’s space jump and Lean Cuisine’s scales worked because the idea was unforgettable, not because the branding was loud.
The best activations are built to be shared: Every campaign here gave people a reason to film, post, and talk, turning the audience into the distribution.
You can reposition a brand with one experience: Lean Cuisine moved from diet food to a brand about self-worth with a single installation.
Emotion is the mechanism: Whether awe, humor, or empowerment, each campaign led with a feeling, because feeling is what people remember.

5 Experiential Marketing Examples Worth Studying

These five campaigns span energy drinks, paint, beer, frozen food, and luxury fashion, proving experiential marketing works in any category. What they share is a willingness to lead with an idea big enough to change the conversation.

Red Bull Stratos: Selling a Feeling, Not a Drink

In 2012, Red Bull sent skydiver Felix Baumgartner to the edge of the stratosphere to attempt the highest parachute jump in history, and to become the first person to break the sound barrier in freefall. The Red Bull Stratos jump, from around 128,000 feet at a top speed near 844 mph, was broadcast live and drew roughly eight million concurrent YouTube viewers, a record at the time. The campaign did not mention the product once, and it did not need to. By owning the most extreme moment on the internet that year, Red Bull cemented its identity as the brand of pushing human limits. The lesson: the most powerful experiential marketing sells a feeling the brand stands for, not the product itself.

Dulux and The Color Run: Making a Boring Category Fun

Paint is a hard category to make exciting. UK brand Dulux solved that with The Color Run, an untimed 5K held in cities worldwide where participants start in white and get doused in a different colored powder at each kilometer, finishing at a festival of music and massive color throws. The event has raised millions for charity and, just as importantly, repositioned Dulux as a fun, vibrant, life-affirming brand rather than a hardware-store commodity. The lesson: an experience can attach an emotion to a category that has none, and that emotion becomes the brand’s differentiator.

Carlsberg: Probably the Best Poster in the World

Carlsberg has long claimed to be probably the best beer in the world, and in 2015 it turned that tagline into an activation. On London’s Brick Lane, the brand installed a billboard reading probably the best poster in the world, with one feature that made it exactly that: a working tap dispensing free beer. The stunt was cheeky, shareable, and impossible to walk past, and it introduced a lesser-known brand to a wave of new customers. The lesson: a single, well-placed interactive moment can turn a slogan into an experience people actively seek out.

Lean Cuisine #WeighThis: Repositioning a Brand in One Installation

Facing years of declining sales and a dated diet-brand image, Lean Cuisine staged an installation in New York’s Grand Central Terminal. Instead of a scale that measured pounds, a gallery of scales invited women to be weighed by what mattered to them: their careers, their families, the goals they had reached. No products, no samples, no sales pitch. The #WeighThis campaign generated over 200 million impressions and a 428% increase in brand conversation, and it helped move Lean Cuisine from a diet label to a brand about self-worth. The lesson: the right experience can reposition a brand more effectively than any ad campaign.

Louis Vuitton x League of Legends: An Unexpected Partnership

In 2019, luxury house Louis Vuitton partnered with Riot Games’ League of Legends, the world’s most-played PC game, creating a bespoke travel case for the League of Legends World Championship trophy and a limited-edition LVxLOL clothing collection. The unlikely pairing of French luxury and competitive esports generated enormous attention precisely because it was unexpected, introducing each brand to the other’s massive, previously separate audience. The lesson: an unexpected partnership can unlock an entirely new market and make an established brand feel newly relevant.

The Bottom Line

The thread running through all five campaigns is simple: none of them led with a product. Red Bull sold awe, Dulux sold joy, Carlsberg sold a moment, Lean Cuisine sold self-worth, and Louis Vuitton sold relevance to a new generation. Each built an experience around an emotion or an idea big enough to change how people saw the brand, and let the audience carry the message from there. That is the real lesson of experiential marketing: you do not have to have the biggest budget to shift perception, you have to have an idea worth experiencing, and the willingness to bring it into the real world where people can feel it.

Author

David Botbol

EVP, Managing Director @ FTP Agency

David Botbol thrives on turning bold ideas into real-world brand moments. As Executive VP and Managing Director of Food Truck Promotions, and a leader within the New York and Los Angeles Food Truck Associations, he draws on a background in business development and startups to help brands connect with audiences through creative, unforgettable mobile experiences.