What is experiential marketing? When you watch a television commercial you see it, you hear it, but do you really experience it? You don't. A television commercial is traditional advertising. It talks to you but there is no interaction. Experiencial marketing is just that - An experience; it is designed to be interactive with the consumer, to engage all of the consumer's senses so as to elicit emotional responses in a way that traditional advertising, like television commercials cannot.

How can marketing be interactive? A company that takes its marketing message directly to the consumer is interactive. For example, a beer company that provides its brand for free on a special promotion night at a popular nightclub is interactive. That's experiential marketing. People encounter the product precisely where they will be exposed to it in the future. Proponents of experiential marketing believe that, like the nightclub example, consumers will be more apt to internalize the marketing message this way than they would, say, in seeing a beer ad on TV.

In a real life example of experiential marketing, the Hollywood produced movie, Snakes On A Plane, was advertised in many different ways. One innovative advertising method that they used was they recorded the voice of the movie's star, which was played by Samuel L. Jackson. With that they created a section on the movie's website where a user can enter the name, phone number, and a few personal details of a friend whom, in turn, would be telephoned by Samuel L Jackson's pre-recorded voice with a personal invitation from him to go see Snakes On A Plane. It worked! The movie's opening was huge.

Experiential marketing is a relatively new concept and when a marketing campaign designed around it works it becomes huge. Many business experiential marketing are a success due to viral factors. People love it. They talk about it. They tell their friends. Brands can become an instant success with a good experiential marketing campaign.

In each case, experiential marketing is about encountering a brand in an immensive experience that engages the senses in a way that traditional advertising or marketing never has; it is a user experience.