When traditional mass marketing started losing steam, marketers felt the need to engage their consumers at a personal level. This led to the advent of on-ground brand activation that enabled marketers to spread brand awareness, initiate product trials, respond to consumers' queries and also close sales. Open-air markets, and later malls and office complexes became favourite destinations for brand activations, and all types of brands started investing in them.
Nowadays, on-ground activations have become an integral part of the marketing mix for brands. While they deliver good results in some cases, their return on investment is gradually witnessing a steep fall. One of the reasons behind this trend is a large number of many activations happening nowadays, which has reduced the interest levels of consumers. Also, as most of these activations happen in high traffic areas in the cities, there is hardly any customization. This means brands are engaging the wrong set of target audiences, and losing time and money in the process.
The concept of custom Activation’ has now come into play to address this marketing challenge. Custom Activation means engaging the right target audience, at the right place and at the time when he is open to receive the brand message and take the desired actions. For example, a person shopping for fitness accessories is more likely to buy a health drink. He has the right frame of mind to absorb the messaging of a fitness drink brand and make a purchase decision. If the same message is thrown at people at an ice cream parlour, it would simply not work.
Something similar is being done by marketers on digital and social media marketing platforms when you get purchase suggestions based on your search history.
At Pulp, we have conceptualized and implemented Custom Activation campaigns that have delivered amazing results. These include:
Philips – The Big Leap challenge
Looking cool and attractive is one of the top priorities of college-goers. In every college campus, there are a few students who set the trends for their peers to follow.
Philips India wanted to reach out to such trendsetters and budding marketers to experience and promote Philips among style-savvy peers at the campus.
In keeping with this, we organized an invite-only, live simulation marketing challenge wherein 525 young aspiring marketers were recruited from 225+ top B-schools.We encouraged them to experience, adopt and advocate the Philips Pro Skin Advance Trimmer. They competed against each other in six stages of this fierce battle to study, capture, engage and dominate their market.
In a nutshell, these young marketers became the brand ambassadors, the campus became the market and the peers became the audience. The end goal of the activation was to establish the product among the college communities, which was smoothly achieved, and the activation turned out to be a success.
Google Play Books Activation at the Delhi International Airport
Google Play was launched in India when the online content consumption was rising phenomenally across the country. In such a scenario, it was imperative to popularize the new and unique Google Play Books app as an online library offering easy availability for a convenient book-reading experience on-the-go and to propagate the message of this eco-friendly (paper-free) way to read.
As people have ample spare time after check-in at the airports and most of them use this time to read, we planned to reach them at this moment. The activation was carried out at the Terminal 3 of the Delhi Airport and travellers with an affinity towards reading were targeted. By interacting with hundreds of people and spreading awareness about Google Play Books, we achieved a sizeable number of on-spot downloads.
Intel – Ek KadaAnchorm Unnati Ki Aur
Youngsters aiming to make it big in life in non-urban India are unable to realize their dreams owing to the lack of computers and Internet connectivity. Intel wanted to bridge this need gap by an activation targeted at such dreamers.
To reach them effectively, we created UnnatiKendras at Common Service Centres, which are used by the non-urban population to access various government to citizen services electronically. These centres were equipped with computers, internet connectivity and Unnati Gurus, who engaged, interacted and delivered interactive training sessions using audio-visual content. This activation helped Intel reached more than 50 million consumers across the country and there was an improvement of 87% in relevance and purchase intent. Interested in realizing better returns on investments with custom activations?
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