Maker’s Mark, the premium Kentucky bourbon whisky with a distinctive red wax seal, has chosen brand experience agency BEcause to spearhead a multi-tiered below the line campaign to get people talking about the brand in 2011.

BEcause’s aim is to drive sales and increase brand loyalty through an integrated campaign that will include experiential marketing, in-bar sampling, social media and on-pack promotions.

Karen Evans, managing director at BEcause comments:

“Maker’s Mark has a distinctive brand personality, based around handmade individuality.  This campaign will use tried and tested experiential techniques to showcase Maker’s Marks’ hand crafted heritage, whilst driving trial and increasing brand awareness.”

This is the second time that BEcause has worked with Maker’s Mark. In 2009, the agency created a “Shoreditch takeover” with live events and sampling in the trendy London district.  This included live art installations in bars around the district using the brand’s signature red wax.

Maker’s Mark was first introduced to the UK market 10 years ago and was the UK’s fastest growing US premium whiskey at the end of 2010.

Adam Shapland

In his new role at BEcause Adam will be working on a major integrated brand experience for one of the agencies newest clients Cafédirect.

Prior to joining BEcause, Adam worked at Splendid Communications UK & Australia offices where he worked on brand activations and events for brands including Smirnoff, Lucozade and Phones4U.

Sharon Richey, Founder, BEcause

It’s been quite sometime since we started talking about ‘experiential’, first it was just a few specialist agencies talking about it and now it seems like the whole world has a brand experience offering. Brand experience is now fully embraced by brands and agencies alike, and as a result, the benchmark for a great brand experience has been significantly raised.  Consumers are expecting more from brands and brands are expecting agencies to be more creative with their offering. Social media and technology has played a significant part in this, but the basic principles still remain the same.  With this in mind, we give you this ‘The 7 Rules of Brand Experience’:

1. Move with the times, try new things!

Get creative, it’s the only way you’re going to entertain your consumer and hold their ever-dwindling attention span. Social platforms like FourSquare, Facebook Places and Twitter lend themselves to brand experience particularly well and it’s rare to see a campaign today that doesn’t embrace at least one of these.  Using a new platform to take a fresh approach will get people talking about your brand and make it stand out. Marks & Spencer did this particularly well when it recently teamed up with O2 to give customers location-based food and drink freebies.

2. Think like your target audience

Take the time to get to know your audience, it’ll make or break your campaign. Talking to the right person, at the right time and with the right message requires great insight. Do your homework and find out who your influencers are. Look at Eurostar’s ‘high-speed theatre experience’ at last summer’s Start Festival for a great example of giving a specific audience a hugely relevant experience.

3. Think social

Getting people talking online requires them to have something interesting to talk about, a brand experience that has gone above and beyond a single product sample in their hand. Involve, interact with and entertain your audience. Consumers are bored of one-way brand broadcasts, now they want to talk with brands. Generate positive two-way conversation online and the rewards will be endless for both parties. Just look at how Porsche thanked its million Facebook fans for their support last month.

4. Put yourself in the client’s shoes

Understand what the client wants and, most importantly, why they want it. Keep asking yourself ‘How will their brief deliver against the businesses objectives?’, ‘What will be the success measures?’  Show business acumen by putting yourself in their shoes, if it was your money what would you want in return?  Take this US-based games retailer that extended the visibility of a recent brand experience by staging it away from the usual choice of a shop into a public car park with high-volumes of footfall.

5. Get the basics right

A great brand experience is more than a big boardroom idea. Concepts that look great on paper can very quickly become ‘un-big’ in reality. You need to work with the specialists to get this right and get your idea translated into something manageable and deliverable in the real world.

6. Pick the perfect team

Knowing new stuff is important, but experience really does matter.  Fill your agency with people who are not only passionate about creating fantastic experiences for your brands, but also have the experience to efficiently deliver the program.  We have a long history creating brand experiences including our recent award-winning work for Pampers. An element of our success here is down to the selection of Brand Ambassadors – all mums chosen for their ability to relate to Pampers’ target audience.

7. Measure, measure, measure!

It’s vital to understand how to measure effectiveness, if you don’t understand the metrics you can’t plan. Planning is the beginning of the brand experience journey, without it, who knows where you’ll end up!

Do you agree with our rules?

Perhaps you have some great examples of them in action?

If so, we’d love you to share them with us.

What a great example of a brand that really knows how to engage with online communities.  Everyone wants to see a Porsche with their name on it don’t they?

Source: Porsche

Source:  Creative Guerilla Marketing

Instead of offering the standard midnight sale for its newest game release, this US-based video game retailer transformed an ordinary car park into an video games arcade where gamers could play the new release on large inflatable movie screens.

Source: Blazing Star Cinema

LG set up a Facebook Group to recruit 5 women for the campaign, who were then secretely filmed ‘candid camera’ style smashing their boyfriends TVs while they watched.

The LG team came to the rescue shortly afterwards with a brand new LED TV for the shell-shocked men, but pausing for sufficiently long enough to get some hilarious reactions!

Original post by ibelieveinadvertising

With geo-location on course to start reaching the mainstream this year, non-retail brands could also benefit right now from using these networks to engage on a highly-targeted and much deeper level with consumers.

Which platforms should we focus on and why?

Facebook now has over 500 million users worldwide, so Facebook Places will be the logical first step for most. But Foursquare should be viewed as a close second, because although it doesn’t match Facebook on size (5 million users globally) the network does have nearly two years of location-specific development and innovation under its belt.

User-base aside, both Facebook and Foursquare have recently announced new features and services that brands can benefit from straight away. Here’s how…

Facebook

Make your app more social:

Facebook have made it easy for brands to create their own location-based mobile app.

Apps built around the new mobile platform will allow people to log-in and check-in to a location using their Facebook account. As well as the check-in being pushed out to their friend network, the user can also see which of their friends are using the app or are nearby. The result is a fully branded, location-centric experience that is instantly more social and integrates with your existing Facebook presence.

Hyper-local incentives:

The new Facebook ‘Deals’ feature allows Facebook Page owners to create offers that are linked to a specific location. Options include Individual deals (‘20% off X’), Friend deals (‘bring 8 friends and you’ll all get 20% off’) or Loyalty deals (‘check-in X times to get a free X’).

These hyper-targeted offers incentivise people to check-in, help influence consumer behaviour at an event (or location) and create advocates from loyal Followers.

Foursquare

Launch a brand presence:

Initially focused on venue-based businesses, Foursquare have now set their sights on helping brands launch a presence using the ‘Pages’ feature. Similar in format to a Facebook Page, these Foursquare Pages offer a fixed, branded destination that users can visit if they want to connect. Although new Pages currently need to be activated by Foursquare (and there’s a waiting list), very soon they will be automated and easy to create via a web tool.

Location-specific content:

Once a brand has established their Page, it’s possible to attach tips and other content (now including photos) to locations. This allows them to build a hyper-targeted network of Followers and engage with consumers using content that is tailored by region or location. User will see all of a brand’s content if they are following them and the content will also be available to any user if they are near the location.

Play the game and develop advocates:

Foursquare have very cleverly built their experience around a ‘game’ concept where people are rewarded with ‘badges’ for interacting with locations. Brands have the opportunity to create their own ‘badges’ and reward loyal Followers. Badges are also a great way to encourage specific interactions or behaviour that fits with a campaign. A great example would be CNN’s ‘Healthy Eater’ badge that rewarded followers who checked-in at certain Farmer’s Markets.

2011 and beyond

The emergence of geo-location has led to an expanding range of new social platforms being launched and in such a fast-moving market it’s hard to predict which networks will rise to stardom or fall from grace in the next 12 months. But with such a wealth of opportunity now available to help integrate the online and offline worlds, isn’t it time more brands started exploring this new way of reaching the consumer? Facebook Places and Foursquare are a great place to start.

These brightly coloured, WiFi-enabled mouth accessories have been all the rage with the Japanese youth since fashion retailer Laforet Harajuku used them in their recent Winter season advertising campaign.

Just don’t tell Kanye West, the temptation would be too much for him to bear!

Original post via NY Times

Evans has been a director of BEcause since 2009.  She takes over day to day management of the agency from BEcause founder Sharon Richey, who moves into a new role developing business partnerships and global opportunities.

BEcause enjoyed a spectacular end to 2010, winning six competitive pitches in six weeks for top fashion, food, drink and clothing brands.  The agency was also singled out as one of Marketing’s best experiential marketing agencies in its annual Agency of the Year accolades.

Bakery brand Warburtons is one new client of BEcause.  The agency has been appointed to help promote the brand’s core range and new gluten-free products throughout 2011.

As a result of all its recent new business success, BEcause is now actively recruiting for a number of senior account management, digital and creative roles to support its expansion.

Karen Evans, managing director of BEcause, comments:

“We’ve developed our creative and digital skills significantly over the last year, and it’s great to see our strategy really paying off.  Our aim is simple – to create engaging brand experiences that get people talking about brands in both the physical and digital worlds.   Demand for this kind of ‘conversational marketing’ via a rich mix of experiential and social media continues to grow, and we’re expecting to grow our revenues by around 40% this year.”

Prior to joining BEcause, Karen was founding partner of Woo and managing director of Closer, the experiential arm of Billington Cartmell, which she set up in 2001.