The purpose of any marketing effort is to deliver a message to your target audience. Either it’s a customer facing activation, a B2B trade show, or an internal event, the ideal outcome is that any of those groups walks away with the idea you wanted to transmit.
In BTL marketing, we rely on mainly two things: our assets and setup (environment), and the ability of our Brand ambassadors to interact and connect with the audience. As creative directors, our goal is to maximize both to ensure our activations are as memorable as possible, guests interact with our space and brands for a long time, and that they go home thinking about us. Sounds simple, but if you’re in this business like I’ve been for 15 years, you know it’s not.
When we were asked to develop an activation for the FSOP (Food Services and On Premise) team of the Coca-Cola Company, we weren’t told much. In fact, all we got were 4 core values over which the leadership wanted to direct the future of the organization, and 2 or 3 “outcomes” they wanted to get out of the meeting. This sounds like nothing if you’re thinking about tackling this challenge from a traditional perspective. However, if you think: What does a group of kids need to play? Not much, really. A couple sticks, a bunch of cushions, 3 boxes, and they’re ready to fight for the middle earth. That’s the power of games.
At this point you’d think: These weren’t kids, they were executives at a team meeting where they were receiving the strategy and other crucial messaging from their leaders. And you’re right! But that didn’t stop us from creating a whole story with characters, classes, roles, orders, places and objects that carried the essence of the team’s message and reinforced it throughout the event. As soon as the guests become players, there’s an identity boost. You stop being Dave from Marketing attending a corporate meeting to become a Keeper of Magic in search of the legendary Keys to the Coca-Cola temple.
The other ingredient added to this recipe was the fact that by having a proper game design, guests extended dramatically the time they interacted with our brand ambassadors (who played a game master role), and also had a new space to interact with each other in order to play the game.
The narrative created around the core values, added to the time exposure guests had (all of them because they wanted to keep playing the game), resulted in an extremely effective message delivery. By the time the convention was over, there was not a single person who didn’t have the key messages in their minds. But even more, they had them embedded in their identity.
The conclusion we got was: you can try to deliver and stick a brand’s message to a customer by spending a lot of money, time, effort, and at the end, they might eventually remember it. Or you can make your activation so fun and memorable it will only take one swing to knock it out of the park. We like to do the second one
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