Music festivals garner so much attention that the biggest ones can even attract thousands upon thousands of people in attendance. But all of these festival-goers aren’t just purchasing tickets for the opportunity to see their favorite artists perform live; they are buying the full, immersive festival experience that comes with it.
With this in mind, music festivals can be a great place to showcase your brand. In particular, the fact that festivals are “closed off,” yet large in scope, gives your brand a sense of exclusivity while still maintaining high visibility. Of course, though, your brand won’t be the only one using festivals as a platform to build awareness, so in this guide, we will discuss how you can produce brand activations at music festivals effectively, elevating your brand above the rest.
What are Brand Activations?
Brand activations are campaigns, events, or interactions that amplify brand awareness and build lasting relationships with your target audience. What sets brand activations apart is that they are mostly interactive, enabling audiences to connect directly with your product or service.
Why Use a Brand Activation?
Especially when you are launching a new company or product, it’s important to take the right steps to ensure that your brand or product launch is well-known to your target audience.
Generating interest in your target audience isn’t always easy. In order to build buzz around your brand, you should consider a brand activation. Brand activations should be part of your event marketing campaign.
Brand activations are in-person, one-off events or experiences to make a lasting impression with your audience so that they will feel emotionally connected to your brand.
Types of Brand Activations
Brand activations take a lot of prep work and execution to be effective. There are three main types of brand activation that you can use:
Product Sampling Activation
Offering samples and free trials to your audience is a great way to have people fall in love with your brand and, consequently, purchase your products. It’s easy to think about pushy salespeople when you think about offering free samples to your customers, but to properly execute this, be mindful of who your audience is and figure out the best way to pique their interest.
Free trials can also be digital. If you are offering software or a program, you can send an email blast offering a trial period to your target audience.
Experiential Marketing
Experiential marketing is a real-life, immersive experience that you offer to your customers. Events under this umbrella not only market your products, but they sell your company and brand as a whole.
Experiential marketing is very common in music festivals, especially at Coachella. For example, if you are selling software that edits photos, you can set up a pop-up photo booth and enable people to edit photos right then and there. This will let your customers figure out the usability of your product and see the results right away.
For video games, having virtual reality as part of customers trying the games is also considered an immersive experience.
Brand Activation In-Store
Think of an in-store brand activation as an event in your store where you launch your product. This type of event is where you invite people to try your product, and maybe you even serve food and provide some kind of extra entertainment on the side.
How to Effectively Achieve Mobile Brand Activations at Music Festivals
Music festivals help create an immersive experience, which is why a lot of people gravitate towards these events. Coachella and Burning Man are prime examples of festivals that are not just events, but a lifestyle. If you include music festivals in your brand campaign, there are specific things that you have to think about. Here are some of the most important considerations when doing brand activations in music festivals:
Research The Festival
A lot of the music festivals have a rich history, like Coachella. You should know this history and tie it to your brand activation strategy so that people will have emotional ties to your product.
Know The Festival's Demographic
Music festival-goers are not only young influencers and Millennials. Festivals attract people from all over the world which makes your stage for branding so much bigger. To effectively market to the festival’s demographic, you should be familiar with what they like and don’t like.
Think About Logistics
With music festivals, a mobile brand activation is the way to go in terms of pop-ups or mobile advertising. The music festival venues are huge and you don’t want your brand activation strategy to get lost.
Have Out-of-the-box Ideas
Creative and out-of-the-box ideas can come off as surprising but in a good way! If you can come up with a unique idea, people will tend to remember this and increase your brand awareness.
Examples of Effective Brand Activations Seen at Music Festivals
Since music festivals already offer an immersive experience to concert-goers, this is a prime spot for mobile brand activations, with a bigger audience guaranteed to see your products and brand.
Here are some examples of effective brand activations seen at Coachella in the past:
Heineken Dome at Coachella
This brand activation included ice-cold beer with storage for festival-goers. Once guests were ready to drink the beer, all they needed to do was scan their fingerprint and open the beer storage. With a total of 80,000 people going to the festival every day, there were a lot of people who got the opportunity to experience Heineken at its finest.
Harper's Bazaar'S ShopBazaar
This pop-up was at a hotel-takeover near Coachella where guests could purchase their outfits or accessories before heading to the festival for the day.
Lacoste Live Desert pool
The Lacoste live desert pool party was held at a private estate near the festival grounds and it was essentially a pool party where festival-goers could cool off and shoot paint-colored tennis balls.
H&M Coachella Party
Since music festivals already offer an immersive experience to concert-goers, this is a prime spot for mobile brandAs one of the main sponsors of Coachella, H&M expanded its party to the nearby 40-acre Merv Griffin estate. This party attracted 300 guests and had live musical performances and DJs.
We Can Help
One of the best ways to produce an effective music festival brand activation is implementing a call to action for people to follow.
Whether this entails purchasing your product or simply getting more information about what you are offering, as long as it piques the public’s interest in your company, you will see huge success.
Brand activations in music festivals are typically out-of-the-box ideas because each company advertising there will need to stand out among the rest to have increased brand recognition.
If you are looking into implementing an event marketing strategy revolving around brand activations at music festivals, contact our company today! We will help you come up with creative ways that will set your brand apart from others and help you reach your goals.
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