How to Produce Brand Activations at Festivals

Posted on March 14, 2022May 8, 2024 by britney

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 activations 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 at 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.

Food Truck Promotions 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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10 Ideas for Holiday Experiential Marketing Campaigns 2021

Posted on December 1, 2021April 27, 2022 by Claire Kelly

The holidays are here, and that means holiday marketing campaigns. With expanded consumer spending, and more physical foot traffic in stores, now is the best time to get the absolute most out of your marketing budget. Here are 10 ideas you can use for your holiday experiential marketing campaign.

1. Let customers sample your product

A great tactic to let your customers try your products while enticing them with a free experience is to use product samples. This lets you show off the best your brand has to offer with the goal being a long-term connection between you and potential consumers.

This technique also leads to a high rate of activations, because who is going to turn down a free sample? Having brand ambassadors who are knowledgeable about the product can help boost this tactic, as they can answer any questions potential customers may have.

2. Cater a charity Event

‘Tis the season of giving, and there is no shortage of charity events your brand could sponsor. A solid example of this tactic would be to provide catering to a charity marathon. A well-placed food truck giving out cost-effective snacks and water to participants could make a very positive impression! Who says a holiday experiential marketing campaign can’t mean giving back to the community?

3. Have a holiday tie-in product

Another great use for a mobile pop-up is to promote a product specifically designed for the holidays. You could design a food or beverage using well-known winter flavors like mint and chocolate, and let consumers try them at several different locations. One of the keys to a good holiday experiential marketing campaign is to make your promotion as holiday themed as possible.

4. Create Promotions Centered Around Holiday Events

With Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years all on the horizon, there should be plenty of opportunities for highly populated events you can target with well-crafted promotions. Identify an area filled with your key demographic, and then design a campaign that reaches those consumers.

This could be a festive food truck selling holiday themed treats outside a Black Friday event, a mobile pop-up shop giving out merchandise with qr codes near a busy shopping center, or anything else that will get your brand image into the minds of eager shoppers.

5. Host your own Event

Why simply attend an event, when you can design one all your own? This holiday experiential marketing tactic lets you control every aspect of your promotion, meaning you have that much more control over the outcome. Though this can be slightly more costly, this tactic often leads to great results.

6. Hot Beverage Mobile Pop-up

The holiday season can be frigid, and nothing brings people in like the promise of a hot coffee or cocoa. A mobile pop-up shop with your brand and products displayed in an eye-catching way can further help draw weary shoppers in. Once they have a steaming cup in their hands, it will be that much easier for your brand ambassadors to make that vital connection.

Building a holiday experiential marketing campaign around hot beverages may seem simple, but that’s part of the beauty of this tactic. Customers will attach the positive experience getting to warm up for a moment and taste something sweet, with your brand. It’s a subtle way to tie a positive experience with what your company offers.

7. Schedule a Mobile Marketing Tour

With so many different spots yielding great results during the holiday season, choosing just one can be difficult. A mobile marketing tour makes the choice for you, by just saying “all of them!” This tactic lets you select several different places that will benefit most from a marketing promotion. Festive concerts, busy malls, wherever you believe your target demographic will be during the holiday season.

8. Dress your Brand Ambassadors up for the season

This tactic can be used in conjunction with many others on this list, and helps add to the overall experience of any holiday promotion. Giving your brand ambassadors the appearance of winter creatures or holiday characters can help bring a marketing event to life. The goal here is to leave an impression, and this tactic will certainly accomplish that.

9. Mobile present showroom

People love having the chance to win something and the mystery of a wrapped box. That’s one of the elements that make gift-giving so exciting; You’re never quite sure what you are going to get.

Using an experimental vehicle like a mobile showroom, you can offer consumers the chance at a free gift if they participate in a small product demo. Using a vehicle like a glass box truck is especially effective, as you could fill it with holiday-themed decor and wrapped boxes.

10. Put on a Product Demonstration

Who doesn’t love a free show? It’s not hard to find a spot with heavy foot traffic during the shopping season, and it’s even easier when you have a mobile experiential vehicle. Choose a spot, let consumers try or see what your product can do, and brand activations should flow in.

This is mainly for products that can’t be sampled, like food and beverages. If you have a product or service that you believe can benefit from a professional demonstration, this tactic is one of the best you can use.

Here’s Hoping your Holiday Campaign is a Success!

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Mobile Experiential Marketing: Bringing Your Brand to the Streets

Posted on November 17, 2021June 11, 2024 by Claire Kelly

With shorter attention spans and fast-paced entertainment, it’s not surprising that the world of marketing is undergoing an identity crisis. What used to consistently pull in brand activations and long-term customer engagement just isn’t working anymore, and more traditional methods of marketing are having lower and lower efficacy rates. That’s why many companies are turning to the cutting-edge world of mobile experiential marketing.

What is Mobile Experiential Marketing?

Mobile experiential marketing is a guerrilla marketing strategy that involves close-up customer connection, and physical brand interaction. This advanced subset of experiential marketing takes the tried-and-true tactics of your traditional engagement marketing campaign, and gives it the added benefit of mobility. The world isn’t sitting in one spot, why should your marketing campaign?

With mobile experiential marketing, you can select multiple areas with the same promotional event, helping your brand interact with different samples of your target demographic. Instead of organizing a singular stationary promotion like a pop-up shop, you can pack up that promotion and ship it to a new location with ease. You may be asking, how exactly is this possible? Well the answer to that lies in the different forms that mobile experiential marketing takes. The first step in establishing your campaign is choosing what type of method you will use.

There are several different kinds of branded vehicles that would work for your guerrilla marketing campaign, and each have distinct advantages to help you garner long term customers. Make sure to choose a tactic that best aligns with your brand’s image, and what you think will connect best with your customer base.

Step 1. Choose a Mobile Experiential Marketing Method

Before you design your campaign, you’ll first want to look at what the foundation for your strategy will be. There are many different ways to house your brand experience, and which one you choose depends entirely on your specific campaign goals. Here are two effective mobile experiential marketing variations.

These consumers then connect the positive experience created by your branded food truck and associate it with your product or service. This helps ensure long-term emotional connections between you and your customers.

Mobile Pop-Up Shops

We mentioned pop-up shops above, but what about their mobile counterpart? Pop-up shops have long been known to be an effective marketing tool to garner customer engagement and interest. You walk by a retail space that was empty only yesterday, and suddenly there is a bright and flashy new coffee shop promoting an upcoming movie. That surprise and intrigue is naturally enticing to the average consumer, and more often than not, they’ll be compelled to come inside.

So how is a mobile shop superior? Imagine this surprise and mystique, but with the added element of scarcity. A mobile shop is, by its very nature, more transitory than a traditional pop-up shop. Mobile shops occupy a space for the span of a single day, and therefore consumers will feel even more of that ever-valuable F.O.M.O. With a pop-up shop, you can say “Oh maybe I’ll go in there tomorrow.” With a mobile shop, the call-to-action is immediate. They have to come now because it won’t be here tomorrow.

Branded Food Trucks

A branded food truck is simply that: a food truck that’s been wrapped in your brand’s unique image. Your immediately identifiable logo will be strongly associated with the positive experience of a delicious meal. Not only that, but you’ll have that logo catch far more eyes than it would at a stationary food stand.

Customers will be engaged by the meal, but that’s not the only connection they’ll make through this marketing method. Brand ambassadors will also be there to further connect them to your company, using QR-codes to gather information and offer special promotions to entice further engagement. Food and a friendly face combine to pull in potential consumers and foster a real connection between them and your brand.

Step 2. Decide on branding for your Mobile Experiential Marketing Vehicle

Once you’ve chosen a type of mobile experiential marketing, you’ll want to decide how you’ll advertise your brand on that vehicle. Professional experiential marketers can often help decide this for you, as their teams are well versed in what type of imagery best catches the eye. The key here is to think about what will not only grab people passing by on the street but what will get the attention of those you pass as they’re driving?

A big mistake many brands make is not considering how their imaging will look on the go (hence, leaving this sort of decision to the professionals.) If you end up smashing too many words or graphics onto your vehicle, it will look like little more than a blur when driving by potential consumers. Make the image simple yet provocative, and have ways the customers can find more information online clearly displayed.

Step 3. Select an area comprised mainly of your Target Demographic

This step depends heavily on what type of customer you are intending to reach. You’ll want to research where your target demographic resides, and what location would best allow you to connect with them. For example, if you are selling fitness-related products, you would want to select areas near gyms or fitness centers.

Choosing incorrectly could mean an unsuccessful mobile experiential marketing campaign and an unnecessary drain on your budget. If your promotions are established in an area where no one is interested, then why would anyone want to connect with your brand. Choosing the right areas can be difficult, and this is where it is again always better to seek out the guidance of trained marketers.

Where can I get help with my mobile experiential marketing campaign?

Designing a mobile experiential marketing campaign is not easy, and takes years of experience to pull off. The best way to establish your experiential strategy is to go through a company that specializes in this marketing style. If you want the absolute best in the industry, you’ll want to choose Food Truck Promotions.

At FTP, our mobile marketing campaigns have helped big-name businesses like Chanel, Adidas, Arizona Ice Tea, and Dior successfully advertise their brands. We take the time to research what style of mobile marketing works best for you, and where exactly our promotions will be the most effective.

If you want a better R.O.I for your marketing campaigns and stronger connections with potential consumers, then mobile experiential marketing is for you. Simply contact us or learn more about us here.

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How Technology Is Changing How We Treat Unique Street Marketing

Posted on October 21, 2021October 21, 2021 by Claire Kelly

With the world of tech growing exponentially, new technology has revolutionized the way we connect with new customers. While more common tactics are falling by the wayside, unique street marketing strategies allow for brands to stand out amongst the pack.

If you want your brand to survive in this competitive business landscape, you’ll want to understand just how important technology is to various forms of unique street marketing.

What is Unique Street Marketing?

Unique street marketing are novel forms of traditional guerilla marketing strategies. These traditional marketing strategies can be as simple as putting up posters, passing out flyers, or commissioning art displays bearing your brand’s name. While these strategies can be effective, they rely on outdated methods of customer connection. As our society enters the technology age, so must our marketing.

How Does Technology Play a Role?

Unique street marketing uses every new form of media at our disposal to advertise a guerilla marketing promotion. Cutting edge marketing tactics like experiential vehicles not only use modern tech to design a customer experience, but ensure high-levels of foot traffic through social media promotion.

These vehicles, along with other forms of experiential marketing, are only possible through the advancements we’ve made in modern technology. Innovative service displays, interactive product demonstrations, social-media boosted promotional events, none of these forms of unique street marketing would be possible without these new kinds of technology. It’s these new advancements that make unique street marketing one of the most effective ways to grow your brand’s image.

What are the Most Effective Forms of Unique Street Marketing?

One of the best ways to ensure your brand garners those valuable activations, and converts promotion attendees into long-term customers, is with experiential vehicles. This type of unique street marketing involves several different variations, including branded food trucks and mobile pop-up shops. So what do these promotions entail?

Branded Food Trucks

Branded food trucks are a way for your brand to connect with customers through the universal language of food. By setting up a positive environment where you identify an issue (hunger) and offer a solution (food), you subconsciously establish your brand as a problem solver.

As brand ambassadors help facilitate this connection, customers begin to associate your brand with those good feelings. Using technology like QR-codes to gather more information, these ambassadors hook the customers in with free samples and special promotions. Before you know it, you have a stream of new long-term customers from a single promotional event.

Mobile Pop-Up Shops

You’ve probably heard of pop-up shops: these temporary store fronts allow customers to experience a brand’s product or service, while allowing them to feel the exclusivity that a limited time promotion offers. Well what’s more exclusive than a store-front that will be gone by the end of the day?

Mobile pop-up shops offer the feeling of a traditional pop-up, while allowing you to pick out several spots populated by your key demographic. Not only that, but as your promotion moves through a city, the noticeable branding will act as a moving billboard. Think of how many activations you could get from just a few stops!

Where can I find a high-tech experiential marketing company that specializes in unique street marketing?

Food truck promotions are the leading marketers in the experiential marketing industry. Our unique street marketing tactics have helped big name businesses like Chanel, Adidas, Arizona Ice Tea, and Dior successfully advertise their brands. Our specially designed promotions help brands personally connect with their key demographic, and create long-term and lasting activations.

Your brand has something to offer the world that no other company does. Don’t let the public miss out on the benefits of your product or service, and contact Food Truck Promotions today!

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Sensory Marketing: Who is it right for and how to set up your campaigns

Posted on October 8, 2021 by Claire Kelly

What makes a memory? When you feel the rough texture of wool, what makes you think of winter? When you smell fresh cut grass and the playful aroma of daffodils, what brings you back to spring? How can the smell of chocolate-chip cookies remind you of the laughter of grandparents? The answer is sensory memory.

Sensory memory is one of the more powerful ways our brains associate thoughts and emotions with a memory. Memories are most commonly associated with what a person sees, closely followed by what one can hear. The marketing industry has nearly reached the limits of what it can do with these two senses, and those efforts are what makes up the majority of traditional marketing strategy.

But what about the others? What about engaging potential customers and clients with other senses, like taste and smell? The true depth of sensory marketing has only begun to be explored.

The Science of Sensory Marketing

In recent years Sensory Marketing has been extensively studied by the country’s top research scientists to see why the senses are such a powerful advertising tool. What they have found is that our brain’s unconscious desires and innate decision making can be powered by something as simple as the temperature of a beverage, or the scent of a room. With sensory marketing, you have to look at details previous generations wouldn’t even think to tinker with.

The best part of these subtle choices is that they aren’t seen as marketing at all. You wouldn’t enter a building that smelled of chocolate and become annoyed by the obvious olfactory sales pitch. You’d be delighted by the aroma of cocoa beans, maybe get lost in the memory of some family vacation where your parents bought you a delightful bar of chocolate, and before you know it, you’re walking out with a pound of fair-trade confections.

That’s the power of sensory marketing: you aren’t smacking consumers over the head with a bulky advertisement, you’re allowing them to enjoy a taste of nostalgia in a comforting environment. The way to do this is to engage those less focused on senses. Let’s start with the one that is often overlooked: your nose.

Scent Marketing: Why it works, and how you can use it

When you think of senses, smell is often an underrated feature of the human experience. There is great importance to seeing, hearing, and feeling something, but what about our noses? With more and more studies showing that people’s sense of smell plays a large role in how they develop and solidify memories. A close connection has been found between the sections of the brain that dictate emotion, memory recall, and our olfactory senses. What does this mean? Basically, a smell can not only bring you back to some cherished moment in the past, but how you felt when you were there.

The chocolate example above does well to service this point, but that is just the tip of the iceberg. Scent Marketing, or Aroma Marketing, is about choosing a fragrance that puts the customer in that buying mood. Depending on your product, you have to strategically set up what scent environment works best for that particular item.

With businesses like a candle shop, this may be more obvious. If summer is around the corner, having an apple-pie scent wafting from your shop will draw in customers with memories of pies cooling on window sills. But with other products, it may not be that simple.

If you run a car dealership, smell may be the last thing on your mind. You want to show potential customers the car’s features, the benefits of an extended warranty, and the safety rating of a given vehicle. But by creating a pleasant scent in your dealership, you can increase the amount of time car-buyers spend in your shop.

The longer they stay, the higher chance they will make a purchase. An enjoyable aroma causes those walking the showroom floor to positively associate that smell with your brand, giving them an overall better experience inside your business.

Taste Marketing: Tip of the Tongue Tips

Along with smell, taste is not always thought about when developing sensory marketing campaigns. For food brands, taste marketing is the name of the game . Having a unique flavor that your consumer can associate with your brand is paramount to establishing a connection with those all important memory centers in their brain.

Classic examples of these connections exist throughout popular culture: a certain soda brand conjuring images of childhood birthdays, the crunch of a french fry leading us back time and time again to the golden arches, the list goes on. Positioning the taste of your product to invoke that valuable nostalgia present in all consumers is important.

But what if you don’t have a food related product? Can you still utilize taste marketing in your campaign or strategy? Absolutely! Let’s look at a common practice you’ve probably seen in auto body repair or tire stores, and never thought twice about: Popcorn machines.

Car tires have absolutely zero to do with taste, but somehow brands like Les Schwab have found a way to associate the delicious salt and crunch of popcorn with their brands. Customers get the comfort and enjoyment of a tasty snack, and are subconsciously drawn back to that shop when it comes time to buy a new set of tires.

Examples like this show that Taste marketing can be approached from a number of angles. Whether it’s offering samples to get those hooks into customer’s taste buds, or having fresh brewed coffee available for any who come through the front door, taste is one of sensory marketing’s strongest tools.

The future is Sensory Marketing

The world of marketing is a constantly shifting and changing landscape. Keeping up with new trends is difficult, but absolutely vital if you want to remain ahead of the game. Newer forms of sensory marketing are growing at a rapid pace, and the need to employ these tactics for successful campaigns is becoming apparent. If you want your brand to succeed, and your product to reach the masses, the answer is clear: Sensory Marketing is the future.