Engagement Marketing - The Brand Experience

The Brand Experience

The brand and the "brand experience" are directly taken to consumers through interactive channels of retail, digital and live events. Rather than wait for the consumer to find it, the brand takes itself directly to the consumer with campaigns that resonate on a personal level.

This is closely related to the definition of transparent marketing. Transparent Marketing is a strategy used to personalize the content marketed to a customer by engaging them in Web 2.0 social media technologies such as blogs, live chat and product ratings. Through these web based technologies, companies are able to provide true transparency to their company and products, good or bad. In addition, they are able to build trusting and lasting relationships with their customers.

In an interview with Henry Jenkins DeFlorz Professor of Humanities and Founder and Director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT, Alan Moore said...

Engagement Marketing is a very broad term, and purposefully so. At its heart, is the insight that human beings are highly social animals, and have an innate need to communicate and interact. Therefore, any engagement marketing initiative must allow for two-way flows of information and communication. We believe, people embrace what they create. And why is this important? Because in advanced economies the values of society and the individual change. At the heart of this is the key issue around identity and belonging. We have always had community. Pre- industrialization, we were tied to our communities by geography, tradition, the state and birthright. External forces shaped our identity. However, in a post-modern world we can have many selves, as we undertake a quest for self identity. This is described as Psychological Self-Determination the ability to exert control over the most important aspects of ones life, especially personal identity, which has become the source of meaning and purpose in a life no longer dictated by geography or tradition. The Community Generation, shun traditional organizations in favor of unmediated relationship to the things they care about. The Community Generation, seek and expect direct participation and influence. They possess the skills to lead, confer and discuss. These people are not watching television and have grown up in a world of search and two-way flows of communication. Going further Engagement Marketing is premised upon: transparency - interactivity - immediacy - facilitation - engagement - co-creation - collaboration - experience and trust, these words define the migration from mass media to social media. The explosion of: Myspace, YouTube, Second Life and other MMORPG's, Citizen Journalism, Wicki's and Swicki's, TV formats like Pop Idol, or Jamies School Dinners, Blogs, social search, The Guinness Visitor Centre in Dublin or the Eden project in Cornwall UK, mobile games like Superstable or Twins, or, new business platforms like Spreadshirt.com all demonstrate a new socio-economic model, where engagement sits at the epicentre

Alan Moore's Second interview with Henry Jenkins

Last Friday, I introduced my readers to Alan Moore -- not the comic book creator but the brand guru -- a cutting edge thinker about the ways that grassroots communities are reshaping the branding process. Moore, with Tomi T Ahonen, wrote a book called Communities Dominate Brands. The book spells out their vision for where media is headed -- towards what Moore described last time as a "connected society"-- and what it means for the branding process. Here, Moore gets deeper into some of the issues which will be of particular interest to regular readers of this blog -- the economic value of fans to advertisers and media producers, the issue of compensating for user-generated content, the case of Pop Idol as a global media franchise, and the concept of transmedia planning.