Consumer Experience and the New Normal

Raheem Akingbolu writes on how today’s businesses, buffeted by COVID 19-induced exigencies, are leveraging technology and creativity to drive experiential marketing and earn consumers’ loyalty

Before digital implosion, perhaps the major connecting tool being used by experiential marketing agencies to create bond between brands and their targeted audiences, were words of mouth. But today, the goal post has been shifted by technology as stakeholders, agencies, brand owners and consumers now connect via digital and telephony.

As a result of competition and market saturation, consumers tend to prefer innovative brands that continue upgrading their offerings to meet their expectations.

In all aspects of the consumer journey, innovation has become so pivotal for brands to create a connection with their consumers. Leading companies know that great products are necessary but not sufficient: In today’s world you have to deliver great consumer experiences in order to succeed. To create such unique consumer experiences, experiential marketing agencies have become veritable tools for brands desirous of delivering a unique brand experience to their customers.

As a focused approach towards involving the audiences in a way that they feel themselves as a part of the brand and are able to experience it, Experiential Marketing is not new but it has evolved overtime.

With Covid 19, most people at home, not attending events, gathering or pop up shops, across the globe, the experiential marketing industry has rapidly re-emerged to provide a buffer.

There is no doubt that Covid19 has created many challenges for practitioners across the globe, but emerging data signals that millennials are equally comfortable experiencing a brand virtually as compared to physically experiencing a brand.

Interestingly, a significant increase in digital media consumption and decrease in advertising expenditure has pushed the marketers towards exploring experiential marketing more than ever before.

Fashion brands started hosting musical performances; guided drawing sessions to create music playlists like #McQueenCreators for their social media followers and surprisingly, many of them, like Chanel, are doing this for the first time.

Coming on the heels of Covid-19 outbreak, the whole dynamic of consumer experience and engagement changed as government-introduced protocols and restrictions stifled the core essence of experiential marketing- creating experiences. Such protocols like wearing of face masks, social distancing dealt a huge blow on the experimental marketing industry and not a few agencies have had sad tales to tell from it.

According to Mckinsey and Company, consumer experience has taken on a new definition and dimension in the wake of the overwhelming challenge of Covid-19, driving experiential marketers to innovate during the crisis and anticipate how customers will change their habits while building stronger relationships with them.
Significantly, a visionary and consummate experiential marketing professional in Nigeria envisioned a ‘revolution’ in the experiential marketing ecosystem years before the outbreak of Covid-19, and built technology-driven platforms to create a seamless consumer experience and engagement, even at the comfort of their homes.

In 2020, the place of technology became more defined when the COVID-19 pandemic broke. The pandemic greatly impacted the business world globally as marketing activities took a down turn because of restrictions imposed to curb the pandemic landscape. Notably, the experiential marketing industry has been the most hit of all the sub sectors of the integrated marketing communications (IMC) industry due to the ‘unfriendliness’ of the protocols adopted to curtail the pandemic.

A leading Nigerian experiential marketing practitioner and the founder of GDM Group, Victor Gbenga Afolabi, in a recent encounter with THISDAY spoke on the need for the experiential industry to adjust and re-think its operational model to adapt to the imperatives of the digital revolution on the consumer and the marketplace.

He said: “During the 2019 Brand conference, I made bold to say that the experiential industry was changing. It was really not a popular opinion then. What I was speaking about was that we needed to look round and think. If the current consumer is no longer the way the consumer was when our mothers were there or the way I am now, the question is; how are these young generation going to be consumers? The present generation are predominantly digital natives. What kind of information are they exposed to? What is their media consumption pattern? Six months down the line, Covid-19 came and experiential agencies became flat”.

Commenting on how his agency was able to play in the ‘new normal’, the GDM boss noted that it leveraged technology which was already built into its operations prior to the outbreak of the pandemic.

“At GDM, we were already looking at technology, data, prior to the outbreak of the pandemic. Long before covid-19 came, we had started building technology competence. You don’t start building competence when there is crisis. Today we are arguably the only experiential agency with a strong and robust marketing analytics department. We do a lot data collection, data processing, data interpretation. We also do a lot of hackathons”.

Speaking further on how the deployment of the new technology has improved the company’s operations, he said: “At GDM, we have been toying with different types of technology platforms and we have used technology to shape and better our operations. Quite significantly, we have also used technology to improve consumer engagement for our clients. We had the technology in place before Covid-19. What Covid only did was that what we were expecting to launch in 5 years, it put us under a lot of pressure to launch it in one year as consumers are now asking for engagements that are not physical”

He added: “Because of Covid-19, there is social distancing and I need to create an experience around the brand. The only way the consumer can experience it from his/her home is for me to create the technology just like apps like TikTok and the likes are doing around content. It is technology-driven. We have been doing that and that is what has kept us to continue to push in creating experiences for customers on behalf of our clients”.

Succession has arguably been the greatest challenge of most successful agencies in Nigeria. In fact, very few agency owners in the entire IMC have been able to put in place a good succession plan in the event of the owner being unable to continue. Afolabi explained that the leading experiential agency has successfully initiated and completed a succession/transition process.

“We have done a lot of movements. We have seen one of our colleagues become the substantive MD. We have successfully carried out succession and transition. These are critical milestones of an agency where key man risks are being taken out and you de-risk the business. We have been able to do that in the last 9 months.

Continuing, he said: “It speaks to the testament of the strength of corporate governance we have institutionalized in the agency. We are happy about the work the people there are doing. We have had quite a number of young people being mentored.. We have become a factory for producing agency materials for other agencies to poach. We have also become a fertile ground for clients to recruit people from”.

On his projection for the agency in the competitive experiential marketing industry, the quintessential serial entrepreneur said:”We will continue to play a vital role in the ecosystem as we raise the bar and drive the perception of what experiential marketers and the value they bring to the table.

“I think as an agency and at least for the foreseeable future based on the innovation which become a core of our DNA, we see ourselves (GDM) leading the experiential agency segment of the advertising business”.

Speaking on the growth trajectory of the agency in the highly competitive experiential marketing industry, Afolabi noted that the agency has made significant progress and landmark in its twelve years of existence, creating experiences around brands across different sectors of the economy.