In the Backbeat section, Vidhi Nayar, ?Marketing Manager, Flock talks about the importance of going beyond traditional story-telling and focusing on tangible messaging to create lasting memories in the minds of consumers.
BY VIDHI NAYAR
Marketing Manager, Flock
Marketing is all about telling a great story. But what if your customers play an actual part in this story? What if they’re the ones that help you take the narrative forward? Brands can captivate an audience through strong visuals, resonating messages and engaging interactions. But we must go above and beyond that, leverage our unique brand identity and aesthetics to create an experience in which the customer is completely immersed. And the mark of a great immersive campaign has always been its subtlety. Especially for tech brands, on-ground events have always served as an excellent platform to create highly imaginative and impactful immersive integrations. Such campaigns are successfully fusing brand offerings, and bona fide requirements.
Typically, event organizers extend multiple sponsorship opportunities and more often than not, it’s a matter of how creatively one makes an impactful presence. Let’s not forget the myriad gimmicks that brands usually resort to in order to get attention - be it free goodies, live demos, loud branding or sweet treats. But this is more like a onesided relationship, where a brand works hard and pours out all, but the audience just isn’t captivated enough. Once the event gets over, all the enthusiasm wears off. Thus, brands need to create real experiences and touch-points.
We have participated in many events, thus we are also aware of various challenges. At a majority of the events, there is a huge communication and networking gap among attendees and speakers. Traditional means of networking do not connect with a large number of those present.
We realized that Flock, being a communication and collaboration app, could address all of these limitations and seamlessly integrate its offerings. Flock is essentially an app meant for team collaboration to enhance productivity at work. But the gap in real time communication at events gave us a brilliant scope to get attendees (our stakeholders) to experience the power of such a platform for themselves, without an intrusive sales plea or a marketing hook. We wanted the benefits to be their own discovery.
We partnered with the event organizers as their ‘official communication app’. The organizers leveraged our product to extend a unique experience to their audience, wherein attendees and speakers could discover others present at the event, network directly or in the group, and share insights. We have successfully executed this strategy at two leading events in India. The organizers also ran polls on the app after every panel discussion or session to collect instant feedback. Integrations with Facebook and Twitter showcased the event’s buzz on social media in realtime. Additionally, the organizing team had a group of their own on Flock, where logistics and arrangements of the event were discussed and any on-site issues were brought to notice immediately.
It was a bold decision to be an integral part of the event and not an external sponsor. I call it bold, because this entailed no loud promotions or plastering the brand everywhere possible at the venue. It demanded that we remain subtle throughout.
The success of this campaign was that the brand was an intrinsic part of the event. No attendee downloaded the app to merely try us out but did so to enhance his or her experience at the event. The discovery of the benefits of the app was experienced first-hand and this was left entirely to the audience.
Marketers should always focus on giving the gift of tangible messaging and lasting memories rather than telling a two-dimensional story.
@ FEEDBACK
vidhi@riva.co
