In the article, How to Create Brand Activation that Fosters, Amanda Hansen highlights the five steps to design brand activation programs that inspires consumers to act.  By starting with the why, you can then identify the appropriate channel(s) to engage with your audience through emotional connection and compels them to respond.

I especially enjoyed Hansen’s advice on two points. First, make sure that when you’re creating campaigns, you’re not focused solely on a one-off campaign and, instead, strategizing ways to cross-collaborate and promote across various campaigns and activations. I just experienced this firsthand through a large campaign that was 8 months, yes 8 months, in the making. I crafted my marketing and communications plan by channel – website, paid search, paid advertising, organic social, etc. Once we essentially checked the box on planned channels already in market, we came back to the drawing board in terms of how we can extend the shelf life of the campaign. We ultimately decided to pull insights from the survey and plugged them in to talking points at various conferences that we were sponsoring, webinars, new thought leadership pieces, etc. We also created sponsored content ads through our third-party strategic allegiances weekly newsletters that generated an additional 30,000+ points of engagement through their subscriber list. Assuming your content isn’t stale, you can get really creative with additional channel engagement both with paid placements but also organically.

The second point by Hansen that resonated with me was creating experiences for your audience that evoke emotion, ultimately striker a deeper connection. She gave the example of a golf tournament and that you should avoid playing it safe with your typical golf-related experiences such as a hole-in-one challenge. In one of my former roles, I think this is something we did really well. Not only did we think outside of the box, but we also infused our brand into all of the assets throughout our golf outing – starting with the personalized video invitation from our PGA partner inviting them to the tournament. At the tournament itself, we created brand-infused tee signs at each hole to educate them on the breadth of our services and our firm. For example, Did you know that our company is in more countries than McDonalds? This allowed our target audience to visualize our extensive global footprint. We also created pocket-sized pamphlets that captured the standard par and yardage at each hole and added our PGA partners score at each hole when he played the same course at the BMW Championship. This allowed our audience to feel like they were ultimately playing against a PGA champion at each of the holes.

It’s incredibly important to not just activate your brand for the sake of awareness but also bring to life why it matters and how it’s differentiated. When you develop brand activations that successfully elicits emotion and a deeper connection, it builds trust. People make purchasing decisions from brands they trust because, as Hansen points out, it compels them to care.

For discussion:

1. Which of Hansen’s 5 steps resonated with you the most?
2. What brands have you seen successfully make that connection between products/services and emotional marketing?

References:

• How to Create Brand Activation that Fosters Engagement | Ad Age: (https://adage.com/article/digitalnext/create-brand-activation-fosters-engagement/299154)