https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5bttnrX4tE&feature=youtu.be
Brand activations essentially refer to the process of making your brand known to people, increasing awareness and engagement through some brand experience. If nobody knows who you are, they can’t understand your brand when choosing a suitable match. Your brand effectively doesn’t even exist; that is at least in your future customers’ minds. Your brand needs to be ‘activated’ before it can be of any use to anybody.
It’s time to take your brand to new heights.
Brand activation allows brands to create the experiences to win the right audience, bring traffic in-store or online and introduce themselves to the minds of a future audience.
Look at brands like Nespresso, Super Cheap Auto or Ikea and how they bring their unique offering to life, in-store or other communication. This doesn’t just apply to established brands but also new brands. If a business wants to rebrand itself, it can’t just make a few changes and hope people notice. It needs to go through switching people’s minds over to the new brand and making them aware of it.
Where do I start with Planning a Brand Activation?
Every time you step into a store to buy something, you immediately encounter thousands of brands competing for your attention.
A significant brand activation brings a coveted audience in-store, makes new merchandise accessible, and delivers an experience that’s memorable, shareable, and difficult to replicate.
A significant brand activation should centre on something that ties into the brand itself to create a memorable experience for customers. The best ideas intersect with what your customers enjoy and your unique rand promise.
Letting customers behind the curtain of your brand reveal an unknown or hidden backstory behind your brand through unique features of your store, service or product.
Make your brand stand out from the crowd with an activation tied to your brand’s values.
When planning a brand activation, start with this checklist.
• Be clear about your brand values and what you want to communicate. To achieve precisely this, we plan out activations with our clients to perfectly capture the essence of their brand and bring it to life in the most cost-effective, creative way possible.
• Define your market and the exact target audience you want to talk to. This will also help define the space and format of your brand activation.
• Pay attention to the small stuff. Bringing together a variety of disciplines to give life to activation can mean losing sight of the bigger picture, and your message can easily get lost in the process. Creative direction and brand management will play a critical role in steering the ship towards the destination
• Good planning and production. An excellent technical team and production experts help guarantee each job is taken care of. Preproduction panning brand activations means the only limits are our imagination.
• Consider new technologies. Creating emotions and bringing them to life through applications or other technologies should be considered. What turns these activations into brand experiences is packing them full of design, visual character, technology, and staging.
• Never lose sight of the end goal. Done well, a brand activation will help you stand out in the minds of your future clients. Building awareness, entertaining, and staying in the consumers’ memories after they leave is the end goal; never lose sight of that.
• Ask yourself three questions. How does our target get involved? Does it entertain, engage and educate? And why should they come back to you? If you can’t answer these questions, then you might be wasting your budget.
What is the best type of Brand Activation?
A significant brand activation should be designed to boost brand uptake when you link it directly to a new release or featured item of your product or service.
Build long-term support for your brand through the activation by connecting with your customers on a deeper level than you would be able to in a traditional setting
A significant brand activation should invoke an emotional response with your target audience to ensure that people walk away having felt something.
Make it memorable by invoking emotion in your target audience.
Shake people from their everyday lifestyle in an original way so that they form a lasting connection with your brand. Use data to get the most out of your activity; when paired with observational data, sales data can help you see your activation’s direct impact on consumers’ purchasing habits. Enact your brand in a setting that makes sense for the product you’re trying to promote.
A significant brand activation should leverage different media types to reach unique audiences and tell your story from various angles.
What are the benefits of Brand Activation?
Even if your brand has been around for a while, it doesn’t mean that it’s getting the attention it needs to keep growing and gaining new fans. Brand activations build this kind of additional support. The great news is that brand activations can be done in many ways depending on the type of feeling you’re trying to generate and the budget you have at hand.
With your brand activation, the sky is the limit.
Because a brand activation can take any form, from sampling on unicycles to augmented reality in-store, as long as it’s on-brand and helping you uniquely spread your brand’s message, the growth potential is limitless.