Experiential marketing creates impact, encompasses marcom mix – Ojeikhoa
By Abimbola Mohammed
Otis Ojeikhoa, Managing Director / CEO of Brands Optimal has reiterated the power of Experiential Marketing on consumers’ buying decision, saying it creates lasting impact while capturing all the marketing communications mix.
He added that even though other practices have their areas of strength, experiential marketing creates a real connection with consumers, as well as helps brands and businesses drive awareness and return on investment.
He further stressed that it creates product understanding, engagements, conversation and communication, because experiential marketing gives room for the consumer to feel and experience the product at a go.
The experiential icon stated this in an interview with MARKETING EDGE ON TV where he spoke about the offerings and opportunities available to brands that make use of experiential marketing as a marketing tool to reach their target audience.
“Consumers buy what they know, what they understand, and experiential marketing practice is the only tool in the marketing communications mix that can fully deploy and ensure they understand the products introduced to them. This is because there is engagement and there is interaction. The respective practices have their areas of strengths and where they focus mainly. In a bit, through expression practice, you are able to interact, generate conversation, drive leads, close deals, create awareness, and create product understanding,” he said.
Ojeikhoa added, “Maybe not at the same degree with all of this, but it is the only practice that you can say, in real time, is able to drive awareness, engagement, conversion, understanding, and sales. So, that is why it’s a very powerful tool and over the years, you’ve seen decline in budget provision from clients for certain other practices in the communication mix, but experiential marketing has continued to see increasing budgets.”
He further explained that clients are seeing value in what the practice provides versus what others provide.
“If you at advertising, PR, and out-of-home, they all have their areas of strengths and what they mainly focus on. But in the whole mix, experiential marketing stands out as a tool that is stable and able to provide all of those sorts of services in one go. So the reach might be narrow, but the impact is always very deep,” he noted.
Speaking on experiential agencies of the future and how the sector is doing among other advertising practices in Nigeria, in terms of technology deployment, Ojeikhoa said, “Right now, the agencies are being reactive, we respond to queries or briefs that we see from clients. Though we are beginning to apply other tools to interrogate the market, the agencies of the future are the agencies that have the ability to anticipate the client’s needs.”
The experiential marketing expert also noted, “The main issues is the market dynamics and its ability to use data to drive that anticipation and use every available tool, including Artificial Intelligence (AI) to create ideas that will be resonating with the market. It should be able to translate to instant results, because clients are beginning to ask for instant results.
“Nobody wants to wait anymore, so the agency of the future is almost like a robotic agency. It is able to anticipate, to take that data, turn it to ideas, use those ideas to create an agreement that will be able to generate results in real time, almost instantaneously. So it’s almost going to be like a robotic agency that is able to provide instant results, because they already have the information and have anticipated what’s going to happen.”
Comment
No comments found.