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Masters of the touchy feely world

Posted in Advertising, Marketing, Creative, Branwell Johnson, Latest reporters' blogs August 4th, 2008 by Branwell Johnson

“Experiential” was a buzz word last year with companies keen to let consumers encounter their brands in the right environment first hand. Ben & Jerry’s and Innocent Drinks are past masters at this and proved it yet again this summer.

Both brands play on a touchy feely, kinda hippy, kinda organic and kinda caring positioning (although, of course Ben & Jerry’s is owned by Unilever now). All these values are brought to the fore at the annual Ben & Jerry’s Sundae Festival and Innocent village fete.

Owning your own event is obviously the best way to create the right environment to put your message across. And getting people to pay to attend is even better. B&J has always charged while Innocent started charging last year after its free event started drawing huge crowds.

B&J’s event was pitch perfect with a small city farm, stalls selling food stuffs that fitted in very well with the ice cream’s brand perception and fun things like an air guitar stage. The great British art of queuing was to the fore – especially for beer and that’s half an hour of my life I won’t get back. But the free ice cream all day and good weather certainly put everyone in a great mood and the whole event must have generated a great deal of goodwill to the company. Hats off to B&J.

Innocent kept to its village fete theme with Morris Dancing, Welly Wanging, ferret racing and plenty of other diversions, including loud dance tents and an eclectic selection of live performers – no “headline” names like B&J but that was not the strategy.  Sadly it did not have the weather on its side.

The difference I found was that Innocent has far more brand selling in the form of sampling going on. While both events had a Pimm’s tent, Innocent had Bushmill, Magner’s and a gin company all offering a slug of their wares, in fact, one could have got fairly merry for free.

There was also Yorkshire Tea and other products handed out. In fact, at times it seemed the independent company was acting in a more corporate way than the corporate entity.

How to measure ROI for these events? I guess it will be in the positive word of mouth and the reinforcement of brand credentials. Oh, and getting the message to kids when young as there were plenty in evidence at both. Top marks to both events but be careful to tread the right side of the line in the over-marketing from brand partners, chaps.