Brand Experiences
The definition of brand experiences and customer engagement is changing, so how can you stay ahead and enable your customers to have genuine interactions with your brand?

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past twenty years, you’ll have noticed that things have changed for brands when seeking to interact with customers.  For today’s companies, customer engagement is now just as much about online communication as it is about positive offline interactions, which have also evolved; brand experiences in 2017 present businesses with more than an opportunity to simply interact with consumers face-to-face.  

Brand experiences are now valuable occasions for brands to achieve two things.  Firstly, brand experiences enable brands to compliment their online presence with a physical manifestation of their identity.  And secondly, they allow them to speak directly to customers and members of their target audiences from a platform other than their website or Instagram account.

Thus, brands needs to be aware of both their own identity and the identities of their target audiences.  There’s no point hosting an interview with a famous snowboarder if your target audience are management consultants, just as there’s no point in hosting a management consultancy conference if your target audience are snowboarders.

The recent screenings of Ben Gulliver’s cold-water surf film, ‘The Seawolf’, hosted by Wavelength Magazine, are a prime example of what happens when a brand successfully attracts and, consequently, engages with its customers.

Wavelength is Europe’s longest running surf magazine and website and its readers based in the South West are its second largest audience outside of London.  We worked with the magazine to host screenings of The Seawolf in Newquay and Bristol, with another screening scheduled for January in Exeter (for tickets, click here).

But there was more to the screenings than just picking a surf film to play for a surf magazine audience.  Just as the cinema locations were chosen to correlate with a significant segment of Wavelength‘s audience, so The Seawolf was carefully selected for the cinemas’ audiences.

“The Seawolf is cold, raw and rugged”, says Guest Editor, Luke Gartside, “It presents a more relatable version of surfing for our audiences here.  It also features a lot of clips from Scotland, which many of our readers will have recognised from their own trips”.

To host the evening, Wavelength partnered with Monster Energy, wetsuit brand Adelio, and skate and surf brands Brixton and Globe. Surf clips from each of these brands were featured before the main event and Monster giveaways and Brixton’s latest brochure were handed out after.

Naturally, each of these has their own brand identity, but they are still very much companies that are of interest to, and that resonate, with the Wavelength audience, whether that’s by manufacturing cold-water wetsuits or fuelling surfers before a long winter session.  Their presence at the screenings enabled Wavelength to offer its audience more than the opportunity to engage with Wavelength and its brand identity alone, but to engage with the surf industry and the latest surf movie releases more generally.

Both screenings so far have sold out, demonstrating the reach a successful brand experience can have and the exposure it can generate, and plans are now underway to host more, similar, events in the near future.

To find out more about how we can help you engage with your customers, please get in touch.