Come on, Barbie, Let’s Go Market!

Posted on July 13, 2023April 22, 2024 by Sarah

Experiential Marketing

There’s no doubt about it — Barbie is back. Everyone’s favorite childhood dream girl is hitting the big screen on July 21, and the hype has people of all ages seeing pink.

The Barbie movie represents an iconic moment in pop culture because Barbie herself is iconic (so is the movie’s cast). But also, because the experiential marketing surrounding the release of such a renowned brand has created enough buzz to have people longing for the days when they could spend their afternoons pushing Barbie around in her dream car instead of “circling back” and “following up” on emails.

Just like FTP, Barbie is known for her collection of show-stopping vehicles. Her history with hot wheels dates a little farther back than ours, as Mattel gave Barbie her first ride in 1962 when they introduced her Austin-Healey convertible.

Since then, Barbie has been behind the wheel of a host of other larger-than-life cars, like:

Barbie’s 1971 Country Camper: Barbie wasn’t just about girly dresses and bows — she enjoyed the great outdoors, too. The groovy, original camper captured the era’s emphasis on peace and love, and everyone loved seeing the adventurous side of the notoriously posh girly girl. If FTP were in charge of hitting the road in this vehicle, we’d have it serving up timeless classics like hot dogs and s’mores to reel in crowds across the country.

Barbie’s Limos: When she wasn’t embarking on a cross-country road trip, Barbie knew how to enjoy the finer things in life. She also knew that the finer things in life were better in hot pink! We agree that if you’re going to make a statement with a limousine, you might as well go big or go home.

Barbie’s Corvette: Barbie’s Corvette was by far her most recognizable dream car. It’s the vehicle featured in the Barbie movie trailer and a model that was continuously upgraded year after year. We can’t think of anything more fitting for Barbie to hit the town with her friends in than this one.

It’s clear that Barbie and FTP have similar tastes in cars, and we’re no strangers to creating one-of-a-kind experiences on wheels that feel like they’re straight out of a fantasy. Nothing would make us happier than fabricating a vehicle to help Barbie paint the town pink.

Since Barbie was a little too busy with her Hollywood debut to ask us to build her a car, we took it upon ourselves to dream up Barbie’s dream car on our own. We weren’t about to miss this monumental marketing moment (experiential marketing is our thing, after all), so we jumped on the Barbie trend to create an activation worthy of the “it girl” on everyone’s mind — whether she asked us to or not.

Barbie is definitely going to need to unwind after all the hard work she put into her movie. If you ask us, adding FTP’s Barbie’s Dream Airstream to her collection would be the perfect way for her to enjoy some much-needed R & R while promoting her movie on the road. So, Barbie, if you’re reading this, let’s go market!

Get in touch today to get started on your own project with Food Truck Promotions.

Top 10 Best Pop-Ups of 2023

Creating Experiences That Drive UGC

Rendering of a Barbie themed pink airstream with a water slide a pool and people enjoying the event.

Come on, Barbie, Let’s Go Market!

Why Brands Need An Experiential Marketing Budget

Posted on March 1, 2023April 23, 2024 by Claudia

Experiential Marketing

The race to attract eyeballs on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok has resulted in a digital space that is too crowded, creating a genuine cause for concern for companies using social media as their core marketing channel.

With the over-saturation in the digital space, your company needs to make a shift: in 2023, in order to keep up with consumer trends, convert high ROIs, and leave a lasting, positive impact on consumer behavior, your company needs a sizable experiential marketing budget.

Experiential marketing through brand activations like pop-up shops, mobile marketing tours, showrooms, and sampling events are shown to leave a lasting, positive impact on consumers. In this blog, we’ll dive into the details of why an experiential marketing budget is right for you.

Loungefly's Polka Dot Pop-Up

Where Digital Marketing Efforts Fail

Before outlining the benefits of in-person experiential marketing, it’s worth taking a look at the pitfalls of digital marketing efforts. Here are some quick stats that paint the picture:

2/3 of viewers don’t actively watch TV ads.
Overall user trust in social media platforms declined in 2022.
Since 2020, there’s been 12% rise in people saying they use social media less.

Now more than ever, your consumers are attuned to what an ad looks like and what it wants to sell them, and that drives them away.

The Positive Impact of Experiential Marketing on Consumers

On the flip side, experiential marketing has been a significant predictor of customer satisfaction and customer loyalty. While marketers have been led to believe that social media may be the best way to communicate with their target audience, face-to-face, experience-based marketing has proven to be more effective. Yes, that goes even for Gen Z.

40% of consumers said they felt more brand loyalty after participating in a brand experience or interaction.
91% of consumers that were targeted via experiential marketing were more likely to purchase the product or service.
Marketers who have incorporated experiential marketing report a 56% increase in leads.
47% of brands report an ROI of between 3:1 And 5:1 via brand activations.

Successful Experiential Marketing By Small, Mid-Size, and Large Brands

The size of experiential marketing budgets vary across companies; however, brand activations can be done at any level, in any industry, and with any budget. Here are a few examples of different companies that were able to implement experiential marketing in different ways!

#FollowMyScent to Costa Brazil

Costa Brazil is a new, up-and-coming beauty line. To announce the opening of their Soho store, the brand strategically placed a marketing vehicle on the corner that offered New Yorkers a free spray of their fragrance and complimentary coffee. More importantly, guests were offered a bounce-back card that led them to the in-store pop-up just a few yards away, using the #FollowMyScent tagline.

The pop-up café, was a nice touch to a more dynamic pop-up happening in-store, getting consumers excited about a new scent in New York.

The pop-up café, as well as the sidewalk graffiti, was a nice touch to a more dynamic pop-up happening in-store, ultimately getting consumers excited about a new scent in New York.

Tea on Tia Campaign

Tia celebrated the grand opening of their office in Santa Monica with their aptly named “Tea on Tia” campaign, a pop-up cafe that hit Santa Monica, Playa Vista, and Brentwood to treat women to complimentary matcha latté from Sachi.LA, learn more about Tia’s innovative care model, and take home a Tia tote bag.

This experiential marketing activation gave potential patients a new, more personal perspective on the health network with a face-to-face experience that inspired trust between the brand and consumers.

Laneige Water Bank Hydration School

To promote two of their products, their Water Bank Hydration Collection and the Lip Sleeping Mask, Laneige transformed a double-decker bus into a dynamic beauty pop-up experience, treating guests to an educational product sampling, prizes, and photo-ops. Each of these elements seamed together to successfully spread brand awareness and drive up sales in NYC!

Don't Wait to Get Started with Experiential Marketing

Regardless of your company size or industry, experiential marketing is a go-to strategy in 2023. While other companies double-down on digital marketing efforts, you can be the brand that stands and better appeals to consumers’ emotions with in-person brand activations.

Feeling inspired? Reach out to our team today! We can help create memorable pop-ups, showrooms, guerrilla marketing campaigns, and more with an experiential marketing budget that is right for you.

Top 10 Best Pop-Ups of 2023

It’s been a big year here at Food Truck Promotions. With the holidays on the horizon and the new year quickly approaching, we’ve been looking

Creating Experiences That Drive UGC

Why UGC is a Key to Successful Modern Marketing If you are interested in modern marketing, you already know that the advertising world has dramatically

Come on, Barbie, Let’s Go Market!

There’s no doubt about it — Barbie is back. Everyone’s favorite childhood dream girl is hitting the big screen on July 21, and the hype

How to Create a Successful Pop-Up Shop In 2022

Posted on March 21, 2022May 26, 2022 by britney

Experiential Marketing

Creating a pop-up shop is a great way to boost exposure for your business in a new or existing market without breaking the bank.

Pop-up shops give the public a taste of your products or services in a fun, engaging way. But how do you set up a successful pop-up shop? Especially in a world where people love to shop to shop online, how do you pull people out of their pandemic nests and into the real world?

Well, even though it’s true that the last few years have created a world that is less interactive and more digital, look on the bright side: now more than ever, people appreciate a face-to-face, interpersonal interaction with your brand. So, that’s why you should learn how to create a pop-up shop in 2022.

Importance of Real-Life Experiences

Because people as a whole better understand the value of interpersonal connection now, the whole scenario gave rise to the concept of pop-up shops where short-term, real-life experiencing low-budget shops are set up. These shops encourage people to take part in the latest trends of incoming brands. This helps them feel the real-life experience of these shops set up once every season.

How to Kickstart Your Pop-up Shop?

It’s worth knowing that pop-up shops are also known as flash retail stores. So, to step into creating a pop-up shop, you need to begin with deciding which space to opt for.

Use Temporary Spaces for Long Term Impacts

The answer to how to create a pop-up shop is quite simple and convenient. Rather than approaching a real estate agent right away, look for vacant storefronts that would rent out the space for you at a much lower rate.

Remember that pop-up shops also allow emerging brands to showcase their work and what they’re bringing to the market. So sticking to the idea of setting up a low-budget shop should be kept in mind at all times.

It’s just fine if your pop-up shop looks exactly like a regular store. As long as the goal of the pop-up is fulfilled- showing off your brand- the actual method of finding space is less important.

You can also use plazas or quads for your shop. Bringing a trailer to a field is one of the easiest and cheapest ways to set up a pop-up.

Before you finish your space, make sure to familiarize yourself with all licenses, permits, and insurances you might need in your city. Ensuring proper paperwork will save you from a lot of hassle in the future.

Branding and Awareness

The main idea of setting up a pop-up shop is to connect your customers to the brand. This is only possible if you market your pop-up shop and create hype. People spend crazy amounts of money on selling their brands. Any top-notch brand will go head over heels to increase its brand awareness.

As the saying goes, what is seen is sold – and what is loved, is sold a lot. When customers develop an emotional attachment to the brand, nothing can stop them from coming to you.

Creating a strong sense of brand character in a temporary pop-up shop can be pretty challenging. Today, digital marketing platforms are as powerful as anything else to help your pop-up shop come to life. The pop-up shop is the body. You need to put the soul into it with your effective marketing strategies.

The most successful retail shops use digital media to boost awareness. In an increasingly online world, those who adapt are most successful.

Opting for the Influencer Marketing Strategy

One of the most common ways of using digital media to boost a physical pop-up store is opting for the influencer marketing strategy. If you are setting up a mobile pop-up shop, you can look for potential influencer partners. Influencers with an engaging audience can help create awareness for your brand.

Social media platforms can help kickstart significant contributions to your brand awareness. Working with influencers could be a big plus in that aspect. They use platforms like Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook to build a network of loyal and engaged shoppers.

PR Packages

Besides working with influencers, you as an organizer can also send something called a PR package. PR packages could be shipped to companies or organizations that may be interested in sharing your story. PR packages tell your story and pitch the pop-up to potential partners. You can also create that necessary buzz and awareness your brand and product needs by pitching to the upcoming flash retail outlet to local news companies.

The Importance of Social Media in Today’s World

To bring in more customers on social media and make the process engaging, you can also give discount offers and giveaway free products on event day.

All these marketing strategies will also enable you to create user-generated content. This means people on social media will do your marketing for you. You never know, you might also grab the attention of a celebrity in town.

Drive New Sales Before the Pop-Up

A common misconception is that pop-up shops are only supposed to boost sales during the event, and that the ultimate goal is brand exposure. While that second part is true, there are actually many ways to create a pop-up shop to boost sales before and after the actual event.

By creating hype for the event itself, you’re already getting noticed by new customers. You can use this to cross-sell things like event-specific items. You can even push your e-commerce numbers while more people are searching your brand name.

Answering Your ‘How to Create a Successful Pop Up Shop in 2022' Question

While a pop-up shop can be a way to reinvigorate your physical retail strategy, the key in how to create a pop-up shop is to make it viral on digital media. Here is a recap of how to create a pop-up shop in 2022:

Use influencers to push your brand and create awareness

Partner with companies or news programs to get the word out

Use the surge in brand interest to cross-sell and boost e-commerce

Nail the pop-up shop by creating a fun, engaging, and sharable experience for attendees

Use information collected at the pop-up to continue marketing to all your new fans

Top 10 Best Pop-Ups of 2023

It’s been a big year here at Food Truck Promotions. With the holidays on the horizon and the new year quickly approaching, we’ve been looking

Creating Experiences That Drive UGC

Why UGC is a Key to Successful Modern Marketing If you are interested in modern marketing, you already know that the advertising world has dramatically

Come on, Barbie, Let’s Go Market!

There’s no doubt about it — Barbie is back. Everyone’s favorite childhood dream girl is hitting the big screen on July 21, and the hype

How to Produce Brand Activations at Festivals

Posted on March 14, 2022February 14, 2023 by britney

Experiential Marketing

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.

Top 10 Best Pop-Ups of 2023

It’s been a big year here at Food Truck Promotions. With the holidays on the horizon and the new year quickly approaching, we’ve been looking

Creating Experiences That Drive UGC

Why UGC is a Key to Successful Modern Marketing If you are interested in modern marketing, you already know that the advertising world has dramatically

Come on, Barbie, Let’s Go Market!

There’s no doubt about it — Barbie is back. Everyone’s favorite childhood dream girl is hitting the big screen on July 21, and the hype

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

Posted on October 8, 2021 by Claire Kelly

Experiential Marketing

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.