Sledge Blog

Water Campaign

All too often guerrilla stunts are gratuitous or just plain annoying, but this one from Belgium is both clever and charming.

Fete Awaits

A massive fire at the church next to the office, first thing on Tuesday morning, was an unexpected hurdle to organising this year's innocent village fete. Thankfully, no one was hurt but the office was closed all day Tuesday with limited access arranged for Wednesday.

Despite the fire, everything is on schedule, almost the whole office has decamped to Regent's Park whilst the studio are carrying out the last minute requests for the odd bit of signage.

If you are heading down to the fete be sure to check out chief fete talent-booker Josiejo performing in her own right in the Alfresco Ballroom at 12.10 on Saturday. Good luck to Josiejo and everyone else involved with things this weekend!

Howies - the Do lectures

A while back a post on adliterate talked about 'dynamic microbrands', companies that exist around an organising idea that reflects a genuine point of view as opposed to a marketing positioning. Howies are one such company and their Do lectures are a great example of using live activity to share, discuss and debate some of the issues that are important to Howies and their customers.

innocent's  AGM  is another case of using live to open up discussion around the brand. A lot of brands claim to be interested in what their customers think, but here are two examples of genuinely engaging people with your brand.

Bandstand

Not being English, it took me some time to figure out what Corsa (as in the car) meant when they invited me to “an eccentric, eclectic festival” in London’s Old Billingsgate.

On May 3rd, Corsa presented ‘Bandstand’, an evening described as the Mad Hatter meets a traditional English tea party, put on by the people behind Bestival, headlined by Rob da Bank and Mark Ronson . The event’s website is great and set high expectations – illustrating a magical park-like world with fauna, animals and surreal characters. This identity ran through all communications, including actors playing characters from Alice in Wonderland and uniquely branded Corsa cars parked outside. The Old Billingsgate interior was dressed with park benches, super sized teacups, quirky signage and eccentric look-alikes. Bringing Bestival to the city while targeting the core market for Corsa – urban dwellers in their (early) twenties.

Except from a few cars outside the venue and their name on the Bandstand logo, I’m not sure how much there was in it for Vauxhall. With close to 8000 sq meters they could have been a lot more innovative in how they integrated the cars and the brand and still have accommodated the audience, who unfortunately seemed to disappear under the beautiful arches of this listed structure.

It was a great club night out in London and I love the idea of turning a music event into a journey of discovery, exploring secret gardens and hidden corners. Unfortunately though, the event was too spread out to achieve the intention of creating an “intimate” indoor festival. Was it truly individual and totally different as the website claims? Alice in Wonderland seems to be a repeated theme across events recently, and I hoped to experience a more unique and surreal world - more Monty Python and less Mad Hatter!

Are you qualified?

Sometimes you just wonder if you are really have what it takes to work in this industry. Russell Davies has unearthed a rather daunting wikipedia entry for Experience Design.

Height of Fashion

Clare, Jez and Karen have been helping Metro bring to life their title sponsorship of the Ski and Snowboard Show  at Olympia. Here are some slightly disturbing shots from photo iglu.

Experience the survey

A global survey on experiential marketing is being sponsored by the IXMA along with Brand Week and Ad Week. Join in here

innocent village fete

The sun shone, the ferrets raced, the bands played, the bunting bunted...

Some good old fashioned pagan dancing around the Maypole.

Young Arthur dons his standard issue Natural Confectionery Company ears and enjoys a drink.

Ferrets - on your marks... get set...

Geese being herded by geesedogs.

Posters

We have been noticing examples of consumers getting involved in brand experiences in a much more collaborative way; suggesting and creating content and even taking part in organising events. Of course this has been going on forever in the world of club nights and other socially led events. A nice example is monthly club night Get Involved at The Social in Little Portland Street who are running a collaborative poster competition. Design studio Build have created a poster that people are encouraged to add to with their own creative musings and scribblings. People can download the file design away to their heart's content, the resulting designs will then be shown on the Creative Review Blog. 

In a similar vein the below poster for Phil's village fete is a brilliant example of clear communication. It follows all the instinctive rules that these kind of things have. Phil isn't sure which member of the community was responsible for it but it was almost certainly not designed by a highfalutin design consultancy.

Measuring Brand Experiences

The last year has seen a lot of comment in the marketing press about the difficulties of measuring live brand experiences and the failure of brands and their agencies to carry out proper evaluation. Undoubtedly some of this criticism is justified but this shouldn't detract from the fact that lots of interesting work is going on in this area.

Marketers are realising that not only is evaluating brand experiences often quite straightforward but that in themselves they offer fantastic research opportunities for learning more about consumers and their relationships with the product or brand. Live experiences that work well see consumers actively engaged in an immersive two way relationship with a brand and this shouldn't be passed up as an opportunity to better understand consumers. Indeed in some cases the experience of talking to consumers is itself turned into an immersive experience.

In the US, JetBlue's Story Booth campaign, saw airplane shaped recording studios being placed on the streets enabling consumers to record their recollections of travelling with the airline.

Of course, brand experiences typically aren't designed with the primary objective being to capture consumer insights rather this is an additional benefit that needs to be integrated into the experience. The key is to create research opportunities that add to the consumer's experience rather than detracting from the experience you have worked so hard to create. All too often traditional techniques see consumers being sidetracked from the live experience to take part in research activity - often clipboard wielding researchers.

At Sledge we look for research techniques that rather than distracting from the brand experience add to it. An example of this is our recent work for commercial television's marketing body thinkbox. The thinkbox experience was designed to communicate to advertisers the exciting new opportunities provided by TV. The event had to re-engage advertisers with television as a medium and engender a sense of its power and glamour. Two research techniques were used that enabled thinkbox to learn more about its audience and the effectiveness of the experience whilst simultaneously adding to the 'TV-ness' of the event; a mobile camera crew was used to interview people throughout the day and, borrowing from Big Brother, a diary room was created that enabled us to have a dialogue with people whist enhancing the overall experience.

We believe that techniques such as these demonstrate that not only are there many innovative ways of measuring live brand experiences but that in themselves experiences represent a wider research opportunity.

Jez