How Immersive events deepen our understanding of segments, personae or customer archetypes
Imagine being invited into your consumer’s home, looking around their bedroom, tasting their hospitality, smelling the air, and exploring what’s on their shelves and in their fridge.
As marketeers and insights people, deeply understanding our consumers, customers, shoppers or experts is our job. Sure, we know what they buy, where they buy, how much they buy, but do we know enough about them, their lives, their motivations, the context in which our products are used? Truly understanding consumers is not only a data science – it is also a qualitative art that needs to be fed with inspiration and emotion.
These days travel budgets, sustainability issues, recruitment requirements and a lack of time prevent us from being in direct contact with all of our customers.
We recently immersed a cross-category marketing and insights team into the worlds of their new consumer segmentation. 2 role-playing facilitators welcomed and introduced small client groups to the 5 different consumer homes that we had created in one event space. They were invited to discover their customers’ world through a discovery of tastes, scents, and a range of digital, data and interior aesthetics. QR codes took them to the consumers’ digital behaviours, infographic posters brought to life the wealth of quant & qual, and films of real consumers from 5 different markets were shown on screen in each separate space. This multi-sensory exploration deliberately provoked emotion through surprise and discovery, which made the content all the more memorable.
As we navigate the era of information overload, multi-sensory events like this serve to break through the noise of the overwhelming information and data we digest, offering marketers the opportunity to forge lasting and humanly close connections with their consumers. The event was a brilliant example of the transformative power of multi-sensory experiences.
Let’s delve into the top five tips for creating a brilliant immersive event:
- Deep Consumer Understanding: Ensure you know your consumers deeply. Data on preferences, desires, and pain points helps to craft an evidence-based event that resonates personally, for a meaningful and impactful experience.
- Engage All Senses: Create a holistic experience by engaging all five senses, from visual displays to tantalizing aromas. We considered everything from the lighting, if the room was more sparse or cluttered, neat or tidy and who else these people lived with.
- Interactive Participation: Transform passive observers into active participants, fostering a sense of ownership and connection with the event. We asked each visitor to capture what they were most excited about and pushed thinking to impact on current and future brand and innovation projects.
- Storytelling Through Senses: Weave a compelling narrative that unfolds through various spaces, enhancing the emotional impact of the event. Everything element was connected in a human narrative to create a strong and memorable experience of the segments.
- Embedding Beyond the Event: Ensure the impact extends beyond the event, creating shareable content and ongoing engagement strategies that resonate long after the curtains close. We created films, infographics and a playbook so other teams could benefit from the deep consumer understanding.
In an age where digital interactions often lack the depth of genuine connection, multi-sensory events stand as a testament to the power of human experience. These events go beyond the typical death-by-powerpoint debrief, leaving a profound imprint on the minds and hearts of participants. Our empathy with our consumers and customers is deepened, and the decisions we make on their behalf are even more successful.