How do I create the right messages?

Grant Leboff: Obviously, central to any marketing is the messaging. So when you're going to put on an event and do something interactive, where do people start to define the right messages and how do they make sure they're communicated through... people don't think...so you get the brand 'Oh, it's fantastic' but the message has got lost somewhere along the way?

Shirra Smilansky: Your broad, creative messaging needs to have a right balance of some rational kind of product, service oriented, communication and something which appeals emotionally to your audience. Whether it sits primarily on the emotional side or promoted on the rational side, that will have a lot to do with whether you're a high involvement purchase - and really it takes a lot of consideration - whether, you'll be looking at reviews and there's even a number of third party sources that you look to consult before you make a purchase decision or if it's an impulse buy, something which is fueled by a spontaneous moment of excitement and a rushed release of serotonin just for completing that purchase. So that will dictate the amount of information that needs to go to a message versus the amount of creativity and emotional drivers that one to input into the messaging.

Once you've got an idea of that balance, I would say encoding your brand and your product info into a creative message is something which can be done when it comes to experiential marketing in really a 4D way. That brand message, that product information, that service information can be re-encoded into every single aspect of what you physically create in the real world.

Let's just say your live brand experience at the centre of your experiential marketing campaign is a pop-up and all your integrated experiential marketing channels amplify that pop-up to communicate for consumers to go down, to engage, to participate, in some in-depth activities and experiences in that pop-up., to create their content and then to share that out to a broad audience. Your brand and product message could be integrated into every one element of that pop up.

From the physical design of the way it looks and feels, it might be that you are promoting a new bed and mattress brand and you enter the pop-up for the Ottoman storage of the actual bed itself. So a giant size version of the bed and an Ottoman storage lifts up as a door for you to enter into the secret pop-up. Well, that would create a lot of intrigue, it would create a lot of interest and it would achieve the objective of actually communicating the message that that has that built in Ottoman storage function.

As you can see, we've encoded that very functional rational product message into a creative, real world experience execution. And you would extrapolate that same philosophy and approach across every component. From the calls to action on the invitation, to the reason you might go ahead and share that content, which could be a competition prize... again communicating the brand message. So really the opportunities are endless when it comes to communicating your message through a live brand experience or through an integrated experiential campaign.

Grant Leboff: And in your experience with the messaging, is there a way for a brand to test the effectiveness of that message beforehand? Because I think one of the things that people got very used to in the digital world now is being able to test and measure and A-B test and iterate quite quickly. And I think one of the things that people might get scared of with something like this is, as effective as is, it can take quite a lot more effort that goes in, so because you don't want to put the effort into it and then have got your messaging wrong. Are there effective ways of testing before you've gone to actually... create your live  piece or whatever it is.

Shirra Smilansky: Well, I often find that because experiential marketing and live brand experiences so effective, often it's really important to plan how are you going to actually evaluate the success of that live brand experience in advance, so that if it is successful, you've got the right metrics in place and the right model in place to scale that up. You don't just want to create something which the unscalable because when it's very successful, you'll have a problem which is I've done something fantastic but I cannot scale it. By building something totally scalable from the start and actually applying it on a very small test and learn approach, planning what will be those measures, that I will evaluate, how will I do that in a way that enables me to learn sufficiently so that I can take that onboard and enroll it out. So rather than going for that seven city national rollout day one, maybe create a test environment, run your experience for a one day period or a one week period, it depends on the ultimate scale you aim to achieve, and building these test and learn A-B testing opportunities were, for example, in a physical set design, you can try out different signage at different points in your life brand experience. Or you could test out different brand ambassadors scripting, for your one on one communication with your staff. Different flyers... it's really the same as if you're creating an email newsletter  and you sent one email creative to one set of people and another to another before you sent it out to your bigger database.