Think. Story. Experience.

Learning from trends #1 --- Hotels and Cars

A few weeks ago I talked about trends, and the trouble with simply observing and copying them rather than understanding them and applying the learnings. In that original post on trends I talked about how I was intending to look at trends in a number of areas of personal interest to me and see how I could learn from them and inform some of my current thinking for clients.

The first challenge I have given myself is to look at hotels (which I have always loved) and see how I can apply an understanding of the forces at play in the hotel industry to two automotive challenges.

First, a bit of context on the challenges. A client has asked us to think about two things...how to enhance the customer experience at the dealership, focusing particularly on sales and service behaviours...and how to get the cars out of the dealerships in order to attract more young females to the brand in an approachable and engaging environment.

Second, which trends in hotels to consider? After all, I'm no expert on hospitality, and it's not for me to say what qualifies as a genuine trend. So I'll pick four things I observe going on...

1. Stark, clean minimalism moving steadily down the price ranges (from Ian Schrager properties in 1998 to chain and budget hotels in 2008)
2. A new wave of indulgent lushness in high-end hotels and their bars and restaurants (led by Jacque Garcia in Paris, David Collins in London, and now Ian Schrager at his new Gramercy Park Hotel in New York)
3. A growing recognition that the real value-add and talkability can often be found in the little thing (Hotel du Vin in the UK have always focused on extraordinary showers with guests encouraged to take away large bottles of body wash and shampoo to ensure onward talkability)
4. Specialism, variety, and the long tail coming into play (art hotels, golf hotels, spa hotels, surf hotels, foodie hotels, restaurants with rooms, bars with rooms, Joie de Vivre's extraordinary chain of curious themed hotels in San Francisco...)
5. The revival of hotel restaurants from being last act of hungry desperation (think the only place to find Steak Diane in the 1990s) to eager, active choice (think Gordon Ramsey at Claridges)
6. The replacement of formal service with good service (think Babington House not Buckingham Palace)

So, what's going on? What's to learn from these relatively arbitrary starting points? Let's begin with the spread of minimalism down the price brackets...

1. AFFORDABLE MINIMALISM

The thing about affordable things is that they are cheaply-made and sold. So the more complex or stylised an affordable, the more likely it is to be tasteless or poor quality.

In contrast, minimalism is reasonably achievable, even on a low budget. So it should be no surprise that many budget hotel chains have replaced the chintz and tat of the old privately-owned budget hotels with a commitment to minimalism and good, clean taste. They have realised that people are more comfortable in a cleanly-designed, vanilla room than in a tasteless, colourful one.

This is not to say that stark (or should that be Philippe Starck minimalism) is the only trend in town, as I will discuss below. Simply that stark and clean remains a great cue for those brands playing at the budget end of town. And rather than try to go high fashion and get it wrong, many budget brands would be well-advised to learn from this flight to minimalism.

Need more (non-hotel) stimulus? Think Ikea, Wagamama, and Muji.

The outtake for my car client? Consider making the experiences around your budget vehicles clean, minimal, and universally-acceptable. Trust that buyers of a $20,000 car will favour good simple taste over poorly-executed attempts at excess.

2. INDULGENT LUSHNESS

It is very true, as a number of hotel writers and trend observers have noted, that the Philippe Starck era has ended at the top end of the hotel movement. Although I would clarify that it has not been replaced, simply that is has been rebalanced with a range of other stylings that are more place-specific or guest-appropriate (which is part of the long tail trend discussed below).

For me, the learning is that character, colour, uniqueness, authenticity, art, and heritage are all powerful ingredients for successful design. The key is to have the resources and credibility to execute and leverage them successfully.

For those brands that can play at this level, the rise of detail and depth (as a response to excessive minimalism verging on austerity) represents an exciting opportunity. But for those without the resources or credibility it still represents a great risk.

Again, looking for non-hotel examples? Think about the rise of the gastropub and of hearty cooking, replacing the overly-refined restaurant food trends of the 80s and 90s. Think about the revival of high-quality German riesling wines with crowd-pleasingly high sugar content but quality and price tags to match (unlike the cheap, out-of-favour 'sugarwater' of the 80s). Think about the revival of interest in wallpaper, carpet, fabrics, and textures in interior design (with taste, of course) and the counter-balancing of Ikeaesque simple furniture with replica vintage feature pieces (like Eames and Barcelona chairs).

The outtake for my car client? Recognise that, at a point in your price range, expectations change and more is expected of you. Understand that the world is cluttered by cleanliness, and if you want to stand out you will have to demonstrate some individuality and bold taste. Remain true to your brand but find some ways to inject flair into your experiences and presentation.

For more stimulus, check out agenda inc and read their Articles of Faith about luxury brands.

3. SMALL DETAIL VALUE-ADD AND TALKABILITY

The fascinating thing about Hotel du Vin is the way that their hotels do everything well but then stand out for the little things (the showers, the toiletries, the wine list). Not only that, but they help people take the story with them, and offer the same experience consistently at every hotel they own (with variety and local character supplied solely by the heritage buildings they occupy).

Looking for other examples of brands that win friends by focusing on the little details and every aspect of the customer experience? Look no further than Apple and Virgin. But I'm also trying to gather lots of fresh examples here...

Plus, if you need any more convincing on the importance of the little things, check out this post over at the Brand Experience Lab on the growing trend of online bathroom rating in the US.

The outtake for my car client? Find small things that can make a big difference. And help people make your story their own and take it with them wherever they go (but please avoid the phrase 'viral startegy').

4. SPECIALISM AND THE LONG TAIL

This trend/observation may now seem obvious, but it's worth touching on. In every category, brands are realising that they can win by dominating a minority of the market. The ultra-connected world we live in now allows brands to assemble viable markets out of apparently tiny niches (the long tail).

Better to be loved by a few than viewed with indifference by everyone.

It's a lesson that polarising brands from Marmite to women-only gyms/spas/insurance have learnt well and built on. In short, they say, if you don't love us or can't join us, then you might as well ignore us completely.

What can my car client learn? Simple. Just because you don't want everyone to hate you doesn't mean you have to convince everyone to love you.

5. HOTEL RESTAURANT AND BAR REVIVAL

Hotels have revived their restaurants, bars, and even public spaces by recognising that a good hotel is just a piece of real estate and an idea. Within that real estate and that idea, a hotel can allow a number of specialist, third-party brands to flourish.

The key is to understand the idea the hotel represents (and that its desired guests buy into). After that, the hotel can give up a level of control to more credible and capable restaurant and bar gurus.

The same is true for a car (or any other) brand. Recognise that you have a role to play in the world, and don't be afraid of specialising in that role while inviting other specialists to join you on the journey.

There is a difference between brand clutter and confusion and brand fit and partnership. The key is to stay the right side of it.

6. NEW LUXURY

This is a topic I covered some time ago after I had my first experience on Virgin Blue airlines in Australia.

The learning is simple. Great service is not the same as formal service. From fine dining to luxury hotels, formality is being replaced with knowledge, empathy, intelligence, and wit.

A car brand seeking to move up market would do far better to embed this kind of knowledge and intelligence into its customer service than to ingrain a sense of unnecessary formality.

Like all the others trends and learnings here, there's nothing definitive about this. But that's the point. It's all stimulus, all fuel for thinking. But none of it is the answer. And, let's face it, if observing trends was all it took, life in a creative or design agency would be very dull indeed.

How are you planning to be successful?

The future is coming. Fast. And it's going to be a connected, transparent, and unforgiving place that should scare the life out of people used to the old ways of making and marketing stuff. Which is great news for the rest of us.

To be successful in this new world, you will have to start by selling something that truly compels people to buy it, whether that's a product, a service, an idea, a cause, an experience, a job, or even yourself (and advertising won't be able to make up for your deficiencies anymore).

After you've figured out what that compelling thing is, the next question is to ask yourself will be...What matters most, what will be the key determinants of my success...?

• Engaging employees so they love your brand or engaging consumers so they love your brand?
• Making compelling promises to people or delivering on your promises to them?
• Succeeding reliably or failing spectacularly?
• Being passionate about your cause or being honest and generous about your competition?
• Winning well or losing well (a topic Seth Godin explores in detail here)?
• Having a great digital strategy or building a strong presence in the real world?
• Enhancing your hard product or enhancing your soft product?
• Focusing on your employees' rational processes or focusing on their emotional behaviours?
• Finding the right people or designing the right structures and processes?
• Managing your organisation or managing your clients?
• Getting your strategy right or getting your tactical execution right?
• Making sales or building relationships?
• Investing in your brand equity or leveraging off your brand equity?
• Hitting your numbers today or building for the future?

And the scary answer will be...

All of it. At once. Forever.

Which is what is going to make getting it right and being successful so hard. Just as it should be.

Because that's how great things happen.

Lee Jeans, making history with the help of some simple creative thinking

A great, yet very simple, piece of experiential creative work from Lee Jeans in Sydney last night, creating a real sense of tribe among some of Lee's most important sales champions (to borrow some of Seth Godin's 'Tribes' language).

The challenge was to get a bunch of guys and girls who work in fashion stores to make a bit of 'history' (integrating with Lee's Make History campaign), have a full-on party experience, and still get their heads around the attitude and fit behind Lee's new range of jeans.

The solution was to gather them in an inner-Sydney nightclub, get them revved up, and send them out in the world to attack the competition, armed with Lee attitude and Lee jeans (and a few other props).

For a couple of hours, Oxford Street and Taylor Square in Sydney were swarming with the Lee tribe, stripping strangers of their non-Lee jeans, making their own bit of history, and living the spirit of the Lee brand. The pictures below hardly do justice to the energy of the experience.

It crossed the lines between product training, brand immersion, and launch party. It blurred the boundaries between being a B2B and a consumer experience. And it made its own small contribution to the popular culture. All interesting parts of where good experiential marketing needs to head.

Most important of all, it was right for the brand and their audience. Wrong for almost every other client I work with. But right for Lee. Which is everything.

Being authentic from the inside out

One of the key criteria for an authentic brand is that it needs to be true to itself and the people who work for it, just as much in fact as it needs to be true to its customers.

A quick glance at the steady disintegration of John McCain's presidential campaign proves the point perfectly.

I wrote a few posts back about how John McCain's decision to go negative by selecting Sarah Palin as his running mate had essentially corrupted his brand (built carefully over the years). In one decision, Brand McCain went from real, authentic, and healthy to cynical, calculating, and broken.

And it's not just the voters who have responded badly to that...

Leading right-wingers from Christopher Buckley (“what on earth can he have been thinking?”) to Ken Adelman (“appalling lack of judgment") have cited McCain's choice of Palin as a critical factor in their decisions to support Barack Obama, reinforcing the damage done by General Colin Powell's high-profile endorsement.

In short, if you don't stay true to your brand, then your people won't stay true to you. And that's when the rot really sets in. 

Fake sucks (and so does commercial television)

Ok, I need to start by declaring an interest. I hate advertising. Well I hate the bad, lazy, intrusive, self-indulgent stuff anyway. Which, let's be honest, represents a good percentage of it.

So I also have a dislike for commercial television and the incessant, intrusive ad breaks. And that goes for Australian commercial television in particular, with its trick of slotting a break in before the final line of a show, forcing you to sit through three minutes of commercials just to hear the pay-off line in a sitcom.

It's mean-spirited and thoroughly not in keeping with the user-in-control world we now live in. No wonder more and more of us are investing in a combination of DVDs, downloads, and digital recorders to allow us watch the television content we love without the ads.

Now, having talked about some things I hate, I should mention something I love. Sport.

Sport is one of the rare examples of live, destination television that you feel compelled to watch when it happens. Unlike series two of Dexter, which we can all watch at our leisure, sport (like great reality television) has that real sense of "I was watching when". And great sporting moments make you want to text or call friends around the world and chat live about what just happened. Live sport, in short, is the perfect example of 'real' and 'authentic' entertainment. (Just think about it...which brand or political party wouldn't want to create the same kind of fanaticism and passion that sport and sporting teams generate?)

Now one sport I love is rugby league (I love rugby union too so I guess it's a rugby thing). And it always makes me sad to see the game suffer and flag in popularity, especially in its Sydney heartland. But then I see what's being done to the game by Channel Nine and it just makes my blood boil.

This article from today's Sydney Morning Herald tells the story (and there's so much to get depressed about in this, from the fact that live world cup games can be moved but 60 Minutes can't, to the calculating observations of the media industry who are obsessed with quantitative measures of success at the expense of all qualitative judgements). Anyway, here are the highlights...

Channel Nine, in its pursuit of extra advertising revenue, has decided to break its agreement with the  Rugby League World Cup, and not show any games (apart from the final itself) live. Instead, Nine will be showing the games with a delay so it can fit in more blocks of advertising. From real and live to fake and second-rate in one terrible decision.

I cannot begin to describe what a bad and short-sighted idea this is.

Nine is helping to kill popularity for Rugby League (which suffers very low live attendances and is therefore highly dependent on viewers who tune into TV broadcasts). Plus Nine is also helping to reinforce viewers' commitment to investing in technologies that will mean they never have to suffer ads destroying their enjoyment of TV in the future. Which eats into their advertising revenues in the long term.

Like any other brand that has a stake in a sporting or cultural institution, Nine should be seeking to build brand equity in rugby league, not suck the life out of what's left in it. And, as for the future advertising, Nine should be looking to find innovative ways to make its advertising content less intrusive in order to start winning back viewers from Channel 7, which has forged ahead over the past couple of years.

Instead, Nine seems intent only on finding more ingenious and crass ways to turn real sport into fakery and turn people off.

What makes a great planner?

I'm currently interviewing for new planners. Which has got me thinking about what makes a great planner. And what's the real difference between strategic, channel, and digital planners? Or between analytical and conceptual planners? Or, to put it simply, between good and bad ones?

Perhaps, more importantly, what's most appropriate for a new, evolving discipline like experiential marketing and brand experience consultancy?

I often talk about 'experiential planning' being a hybrid between brand and channel planning with a skew towards conceptual/intuitive thinking (given the number of variables usually involved, the inevitability of speed, the common lack of rich data, and the need to collaborate with multi-disciplinary teams of creatives and producers to create rich experiences).

I don't have all the answers (thoughts welcome), but this post by Katie Chatfield over at Get Shouty makes some great points (and links to some more good stuff) about planning and how to do it well.

Banksy's NYC pet store

See this article on Wooster Collective about Banksy's new project, The Village Pet Store and Charcoal Grill in the West Village, New York.

Once again, Banksy proves himself to be one of the most bizarre and compelling storytellers around today.

My favourite bit? How do you even know it is by Banksy? Who is he? One person or a collective? Or just an idea?

It makes it all the more fascinating.

Falling in love with brands in the experience economy

Mazda may not be the coolest car brand in town, but I love it. And not for the reasons you might expect.

I drive a Mazda (in fact it's my second Mazda in a row). And I love the Mazda brand. But there's a but...

• I don't much care for Mazda's branding. The updated 'M' just feels like a cheaper copycat of the Lexus 'L' , plus the use of single digits (like 3 and 6) for the models is a bit derivative, albeit cleaner and more modern than the old 323 and 626 naming protocol.
• I don't like Mazda'a advertising. The whole "Zoom Zoom" thing feels like it is talking to middle-aged women from the 1990s, not me.
• I have never been to a Mazda dealership that blew me away. The places I have browsed and bought Mazdas have always felt distinctly second tier.

And yet I love the brand. Why? Because I love the cars and I love what they and the brand stand for.

• I love the external design language of the vehicles. Even the new 2 looks sexy in the supermini category.
• I love the commitment to quality interior design and fittings, with clear (almost BMW-esque) dials and good sound systems.
• I love the passion for cars that drive well, with high-revvy, spirited engines, and great, tight handling.
• And I love the fact that this commitment to the driving experience is backed up by a long-term brand story, tracing back to the RX-7 of my childhood with the rotary engine that was supposed to change the rules for affordable performance cars (it failed, but did so brilliantly).

So, to summarise, I love Mazda because of the cars, because of the design, because of the engineering, and because of the authentic heritage. It's not about the branding or the advertising. Or even, in this case, the dealership experience (I like the service from my current dealer, but I credit the franchise, not Mazda, for that).

I'd love to hear from readers about a brand they love for the product, the experience, and the authentic heritage more than for the branding or the communication. And, no, you're not allowed to nominate Apple. That's a gimme!

Bring on the inspiration...

Every decision is a referendum (just make sure it's not on you)

Over at The Daily Dish, Andrew Sullivan continues to dissect the US Presidential Race, and links to some extraordinary examples of the Republicans' growing use of extremist scare tactics. It reminds me of an interesting theory in political strategy circles (which I first heard from one of my early mentors at the UK Conservative Party, Rick Nye, who went on to join leading UK polling and research company Populus).

The theory goes that all voting decisions in a two-party system ultimately come down to a yes/no referendum on one of the parties/leaders. And the party/leader the referendum is held on almost always loses (which is why many US Republicans are now so committed to making one last attempt to define the the election as a referendum on Barack Obama's 'extreme' liberal credentials and agenda).

The referendum theory has it that your objective in a campaign is to do such a great job promoting your agenda that the only outstanding question in swing voters' minds is about the other party/leader. Do that and you're almost certain to win (which helps to explain Obama's dominance in the polls, because John McCain and four more years of Republican leadership have consistently appeared to be a bigger risk, and therefore more likely to the subject of a referendum, than a vote for Obama). 

Think about it from another perspective...in 1997, the UK electorate chose between New Labour/Tony Blair and the Conservatives/John Major. The theory would have it that the electorate chose to vote on the referendum question "Do we want another four years of Conservative rule?". They voted "No" as (the theory goes) they almost always will. This is essentially true. Blair's strategy was to shut down all the negatives that had surrounded 'old' Labour, creating conditions in which the electorate could safely pass judgement on a Conservative Government they were sick of and wanted to punish.

Likewise in 2007, the Australian electorate chose between Labor/Kevin Rudd and the Liberals/John Howard. Again, the theory would suggest that they chose to vote "No" to the question "Do we want another three years of Howard and his Liberals?" This also fits well with history. Rudd's Labor party fought a detail-light, mistake-free, safety-first campaign that refused to be wedged by Howard and kept the focus on the tired-looking Libs.

Compare those results with the elections held in same countries in 1992 and 2004 respectively. In both cases, the referendum was not held on the incumbent Conservatives/Liberals but on the opposition Labour/Labor parties and their leaders. And so the question, "Can we risk Labour/Labor and Kinnock/Latham?" was answered "No" on both occasions.

My point is twofold...

First, the biggest risk to Barack Obama winning the US Presidential Election is now a combination of premature buyer's remorse (people may think he is a shoo-in and start getting cold feet, same as when you wake up in the middle of the night after making a big and irreversible purchase) and a referendum being held on him, not John McCain (the risk being that McCain drifts so far out of the race that the referendum shifts inevitably to Obama..."Do I really trust Barack Obama to be president?"). This is arguably similar what happened in his freak primary defeat against Hilary Clinton in New Hampshire.

Second, that everyone from corporates to consumer brands to lobby groups can learn from this kind of thinking, this kind of positioning and framing of debates. Take some wrong and right referendum examples...

On an issue like climate change and personal responsibility

WRONG REFERENDUM: Does climate change exist and can I really do anything about it myself?

RIGHT REFERENDUM: Am I really going to ignore the clear advice I have been given and do nothing about my carbon footprint?

On buying, for example, a Korean car

WRONG REFERENDUM: Can I really see myself in a Korean car?

RIGHT REFERENDUM: Can I afford to ignore the great quality and value coming out of Korea?

On working for an employer

WRONG REFERENDUM: Do I really like working here?

RIGHT REFERENDUM: Can I imagine working anywhere else?

Just think about it...Apple Mac lovers don't spend their days asking themselves whether they really want to use a Mac. But they do regularly shudder at the thought of ever going back to a PC. Their conviction is so firm that they never hold a referendum on the things they love. They only hold referenda on the alternatives, and the alternatives almost always lose.

So, whether you are an incumbent or a challenger...whether you are trying to embed existing behaviours or break a behavioural patterns and inertia...your mission is the same. Tell such compelling stories, and provide such compelling experiences, that the spotlight, the referendum, falls on your competitor. Do everything you can to make sure that there is only one question left to be answered..."Would you be happy with the alternative?".

Because, if you do your job right, the result of that referendum will be an instant, certain "No". And that's how you win.

As a footnote, I'd recommend you take a look at the "Would you miss" series over at the Brand Autopsy blog. There's a similar philosophy at play there about getting your stakeholders thinking and feeling the right things about your brand and your competition. The series applies the same questions to a number of different brands, which gets you thinking about your own brand and how well it would do...

Does xxxx provide such a unique product and customer experience that we would be saddened if it didn’t exist? Does xxxx treat its employees so astonishingly well that those workers would not be able to find another employer to treat them as well? Does xxxx forge such unfailing emotional connections with its customers that they would fail to find another fast food restaurant that could forge just as strong an emotional bond?

Helping experiential marketing grow up

Commenting in response to my post the other day on the difference between branding and brand-building and the need to understand the experiential marketing discipline as an alternative approach to building strong brands, Claire Kowarsky made a great observation…

“At last year's Asia Pacific Experiential Marketing Summit held in Sydney, I estimate about half of the program seemed to be about this very topic – the semantics of the words we use to describe our industry.”

As someone who was on the advisory board to the Summit this year, and who has sat in a number of meetings exploring the possibility and purpose of an industry association for experiential marketing in Australia, I know just how right Claire is.

The challenge is that, while a few players in the industry are pushing the definition and possibilities of experiential marketing to the limit, far too many are attaching the phrase and philosophy to very niche offerings (usually based on temporary, pop-up consumer brand experiences and built around a youth/music/sport/party vibe).

One of the companies committed to pushing a broader definition of experiential marketing and brand experience in Australia is ABT. Like my employer, Jack Morton, ABT has built on a traditional heritage in the B2B space and transformed itself into a full-service experiential marketing agency.

Glancing at ABT’s website, I came across a piece by their Strategic Director, Garry Wynne, about the growing role of strategy in our part of the creative marketing and communications landscape. To help make his point, Garry pulled out a great quote from Albert Einstein…

“If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask, for once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes.”

Going back to Claire’s comment about the experiential marketing industry’s obsession with semantics, I think one of the things the industry needs to do (and not just in Australia, but worldwide) is define, as Einstein would advise, precisely what question we are trying to answer.

My observation is that the question most experiential marketing agencies are choosing to answer today is specific and tactical:

THE BASIC QUESTION. Advertising (alone) doesn’t seem to be cutting it any more for my brand. And even my big push into PR and online doesn't seem to have had the impact I was hoping for. What other ways can I reach the consumers and customers who matter to me? Could I go where they are and engage them creatively and directly in the live space?

In fairness to those agencies building their business models around responding to this basic question, it is probably the most commonly asked, particularly by clients in the consumer and FMCG spaces. But that doesn’t make it the right one for the industry/discipline to respond to in the long run. So a few of the more progressive and ambitious agencies are starting to answer a broader (but still consumer-centric) question:

THE EVOLVING QUESTION. I am doing so much to engage my audiences and tell my brand’s story in different ways these days. Some of it is in the live space, from sponsorship activations to music festivals to shopping malls, some of it is online, from interactive sites to branded entertainment content, and some of it is in the hands of brand advocates. Who can now help me understand the right ways to play in this new world of empowered consumers, social networks, live and virtual experiences, word-of-mouth, and two-way relationships with brands?

But even that evolving question remains limited (and limiting) in its scope. Which is why the brave new world we are heading towards will see clients outgrow their existing experiential marketer partners unless those agencies are ready with responses to a question that dwarfs the two that have gone before:

THE QUESTION WE WILL NEED TO RESPOND TO. My brand is built by more than just effective branding and storytelling these days. It’s the whole way that my brand behaves and is experienced that counts, from advertising to retail to product design to customer service to culture to community. My current partners (branding, advertising, media, PR, and even digital agencies) just don't seem to get that. What kind of agency can help me develop a single-minded approach to how I build my brand across all audiences and touchpoints?

This is a topic I addressed for B&T magazine in Australia in January of this year (republished by Marketing in Hong Kong in February and Events Review in the UK in June). The article began by referring to the 2007 Experiential Marketing Summit...

It's time for experiential marketing to grow up (B&T, January 2008)

Welcome to 2008. What’s your new year’s resolution? Mine is to help the experiential marketing industry grow up.

Last November, I attended and spoke at Australia’s first experiential marketing conference. A number of speakers pigeon-holed experiential marketing as a cool new take on consumer promotion. I offered a counter view that experiential marketing doesn’t exist, because it’s a philosophy not a channel. Furthermore, it’s a philosophy that shouldn’t be limited to consumer-facing activities. It’s something I have said before and will continue to say because, defined as a consumer promotion tactic, experiential marketing is a faddish bubble that will soon burst.

The experiential marketing philosophy should be understood as a commitment to building brands by creating authentic experiences that engage all stakeholders in long-term, two-way relationships. It has the capacity to deliver extraordinary results, but only if it sits near the top of the agency tree, not somewhere near the bottom. So we need to grow up, and fast.

The truth is that clients need us to grow up too. After all, the current system is failing many of them. Consider advertising, right now the discipline that sits at the top of most trees. In truth, it’s a specialism, vital but limited. Great at driving awareness, providing information, and reinforcing emotions, but poor at changing fundamental behaviours or deeply-held views (of employees, partners, shareholders, politicians, journalists, or consumers).

As a result, my colleagues and I are increasingly being thrown challenges by brands that need to shift lingering perceptions, stir fresh emotions, engage different audiences, revitalise old relationships, fix underlying cultural problems, shape new customer experiences, and start new conversations. Stuff traditional one-way media just can’t do in isolation.

The challenge is that experiential marketers frequently only get started with brands once advertising and media planning agencies have finished with them. In other words, brands focus on the talk (brand communication) before they get to the walk (brand behaviour). And that massively limits our ability to deliver the results clients need. In future, brands should focus on the walk and the talk at the same time.

But it’s no good moaning about the fact that the system isn’t working. We have to fix it. Experiential marketing as an industry needs to develop the narrative and ambition to change the status quo. We need to have the confidence not to reach for tactical definitions, like consumer promotions or events, just because we find it hard to demystify what we do. We have to embrace the fact that shaping brand behaviour and creating brand experiences is a fundamental task; long-form and multi-dimensional, it’s about the hardest job in marketing. And we need to attract the people who can help us deliver on our ambition and narrative. Which brings me to Daniel Pink.

Daniel Pink’s fascinating book, A Whole New Mind, argues that society needs to balance its traditional focus on rational left-brain-driven thinking by embracing more emotional right-brain-driven qualities. He talks about six key aptitudes crucial to success today for both people and businesses: design (creating experiences that are emotionally rewarding); story (compelling people through narrative not hard facts); symphony (putting pieces together to create a bigger picture); empathy (understanding what makes people tick); play (encouraging people to have fun); and, meaning (seeking purpose within everything).

The requirements Pink identifies are a perfect summation of what we need to do as a marketing industry. We need a new and whole-minded method of building brands; a broader, deeper, more integrated approach. We have to stop separating and staggering our thinking. We have to pursue better design, tell better stories, and demand greater authenticity. And we have to consider everything we do as part of the same mission.

It’s an approach that will need to draw on a broad range of agencies and capabilities. And it will require experiential marketers (with our commitment to design, story, symphony, empathy, play, and meaning) to be centrally involved at the outset.

But experiential marketers can’t expect to be invited to sit at the top table if we still think and talk like members of a tactical consumer promotions or events industry. Which is why it’s time for experiential marketing to grow up.

With just a couple of months of 2008 left, I think the industry still has a long way to go (the shortlist of agencies for B&T experiential agency of the year, for example, still indicates a strong bias towards consumer specialists, albeit very capable ones).

But I'm still doing my best to keep my new year's resolution.