Creating Brand Experiences While Social Distancing

Need for Experiential design

With changing consumer behavior, the brands have to change their communication strategy. The consumers no longer want to be talked at but they want to be engaged. They want the brand to engage with them in personal and meaningful ways. Experiential design is all about creating an experience for consumers to interact and make a meaningful relationship with the brand or a product or marketing campaign.

Marketing has shifted from being a one-way communication to two-way communication. This change could be mainly observed due to our social nature, we like to connect with people and things, and hence any advertisement which tries to connect with the consumers leave a lasting impression on their mind. The three simple rule to making an effective experiential marketing is to make it different, interacting, and easily shareable.

Strategy in the Post-COVID situation

We all know that brands are doing their best to stay unique and engaging with experiential design. But with consumers following social distancing norms, how will brands keep up their experiential designing game?

While people will prefer to avoid human interaction in a post covid19 situation, they would still want to interact and engage with. Hence now is the time for brands to leverage technology and exploit it to their use. Brands should use VR to connect people while still maintaining social distance. Although it should be such that it can be easily accessed by everyone. The brands will have to understand what the consumers need and miss while social distancing. Then such need can be fulfilled by the brands using technology.

How to stay relevant?

With everything changing, the one thing that should be constant while designing a brand experience is to make it engaging. At Atthah, we used tech experiences to create an on-premise brand experience for cafes such that whenever a person visits the cafe they can place the order using the VR and will be able to access the menu from the table. This will eliminate the interaction with the staff and will give the dining experience a new direction.

In a post COVID world, it will be seen that the audience will care more about what the brand stands for, its values, its mission and how did it communicate during the COVID crisis. Hence it is always a good idea to design strategies and products keeping in mind the audience. Communication which will talk about its customers and spreading goodwill always be remembered and preferred over the competitors.

One such campaign was done by us for Adidas where we tried to change the post sports event behavior. We gamify the trash disposal. Such events require minimal interactions among the audiences and give a fair chance to the brands to express their concern about around surrounding and do something for it. People love to interact with the gaming experience, and it also gets great social exposure.

That being said, although it is true that such outdoor experiential designing will not be preferred much during these times. But such experiences can be taken to their homes. A brand can leverage gamification by creating a common platform where people can play and compete at the same time and win goodies. The ideas are unlimited, one just needs to think out of the box to reach their customers.

It can be assured that experiential design will change its course and will look different than what it used to be in a pre COVID world. But one thing that all brands must have clearly seen during the pandemic is our need for belongingness and human interaction. The brands can leverage this human behavior to reach more customers and connect with them in a more meaningful way. Because one thing is for sure that people will choose those brands during the pandemic with which they can relate and can place their trust.