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For centuries, poets and lovers tried to explain the celestial
feeling of being in love, but failed. They ultimately concluded
that to fathom the depths of love you have to be in love.
The five powerful acts of sense, feel, think, act and relate,
together form what we call experience. The word "experience"
is an amalgamation of knowledge, truth, wisdom and faith.
Man never believes anyone more than himself. It is much
easier to trust one's own wisdom than to learn it from someone
else.
This right brain stimulating act of experiencing feelings,
comfort and bliss and avoiding discomfort and discontentment
is employed in capturing customers in what neo age marketers
call "Experiential Marketing". This type of marketing
aims at creating a holistic experience for customers with
the help of what Bernd H Schmitt calls Strategic Experiential
Modules (SEMs). These include sensory experiences (sense);
affective experiences (feel); creative cognitive experiences
(think); physical experiences (act) and social identification
experiences (relate). To be very accurate, in this media-saturated
world, the customer's attention span is too short to retain
a one glance effect. Moreover, the customer is armed with
the means to skip advertisements and promotional campaigns.
The question then arises as to what can be done to get him
to know the product. The simplest answer would be to let
him experience the product. Let him touch and feel the product
and decide before buying. This will in turn ensure complete
transparency and full customer satisfaction.
The gurus of management call this metamorphosis as the
journey from brand identity to brand experience. Talking
about brand building, the classical theorists will say that
themed retail spaces, trade shows, and event sponsorships
are the answer. But the first two are apparently only selling
a product, whereas, when it comes to sponsored events, they
hardly ever offer genuine opportunities to attach a brand's
unique message. Experiential marketing is more than just
about the products of a company. It is about the essence
that the brand carries. As the smell of freshly baked pan
cakes stimulates the appetite, in the same way an experience
can even generate that desire to posses in the customer.
The amazing thing about this form of marketing is its universal
acceptance and applicability across all the verticals and
realms of the modern market. It has become almost imperative
for the neo marketer to go for experiential marketing. As
Pine and Gilmore, authors of the book, The Experience Economy
put it —"Those businesses that relegate themselves
to the diminishing world of goods and services will be rendered
irrelevant. To avoid this fate, you must learn to stage
a rich, compelling experience."
The information technology sector can be easily termed
as the most critically dynamic sector today. The Indian
IT sector began its journey in 1990 and in seventeen years,
has seen comprehensive shift in its structure and kinetics.
With an annual growth rate of more than 35%, Indian IT industry
has earned itself the position of the axis around which
the Indian economy is revolving. However, the products and
services have been commoditized and competition is increasing
day by day. This is adversely affecting the margins. With
most of the Indian companies shying away from high margin
consultancy services and moving towards outsourcing and
product sales, maintaining profit margins is getting even
more difficult.
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