A great moment can be described as follows:
Being told by my Marketing Communications lecturer that it is compulsory to read, self study and continuously refer to Berndt Schmitt in our final exam... and then ACTUALLY hearing him talk in real life! It was precisely at this awesome moment that I was absolutely blown away at the 2nd African Experiential Marketing Summit. Yet that was just one of the many highlights experienced last Wednesday at Monte Casino...
At the outset, I would like to take my hat off to the organisers and events coordinators of this event. Being my first professional summit, I was truly in awe of how everything was so magnificently orchestrated. Every detail was taken care of, and the little extras that kept on popping up throughout the day were truly conducive to creating a wonderful experience for all delegates! From the professionalism with which I was greeted and introduced to the main players (such as Martin Leong and Carol Abade from Exp.), to the calibre of local and international speakers that inspiringly commanded the stage, the day was seamlessly organised. Not a single feature was left unattended to – whether it was the ice cream carts and vendors that took me back to my childhood days, or the decadent display of pink and white cupcakes at tea time, or the dramatic and sensual tap dancers – the entire day revolved around emphasising the value of experiential marketing. And a good job it did at that!
I did not know it was possible to sit through approximately 7 hours of talks, and to not lose focus even once. The speakers were so gripping, interesting and passionate, that my attention was hooked right from the opening keynote by Bernd Schmitt (the novelty of hearing the author of one of my key university text books does not wear off - I literally get excited every time the lecturer mentions his name in class, and I proudly say “I have now heard him live!”) – right up until Kim Skildum-Reid who closed the conference. The speakers were in a league of their own, and I can only marvel at their sheer genius understanding of and insight into the marketing realm.
What I loved most about the Summit, was the way in which each speaker translated their message into real life scenarios by providing case studies and actual tangible examples of Experiential Marketing. I had always learnt about it in theory, but until each speaker wove it into a real life success story, I never grasped just how profound an impact creating an experience can have. I always learn about the world’s leading brands, but the ways in which the speakers elaborated on the experiences behind Starbucks, Apple and Mini (to name but a few) was truly an eye opener. There was no need for highfalutin and verbose complex language, the speakers were to the point and very clear in making their point.
Ryan FitzSimons (CEO of Gigunda Group) was a real highlight! He really got the message across that you have to create an episodic framework. And his case study of the Charmin Toilet Experience was mind blowing! Anyone wishing to understand the entire gist of Experiential Marketing in a few minutes needs to simple Google the Charmin story!
Carol Abade was equally interesting in shedding light on marketing in Africa, emphasising that Africa requires the same degree of sophistication as anywhere else in the world. Her reference to Johnnie Walker and the mosquito-net case studies were brilliant in conveying her message. She truly answered how one would go about utilising the influencer matrix, finding one person to influence the market, and then stretching out across communities of interest.
I took so much from each speaker and the Summit as a whole. I am truly grateful for having been given the opportunity to experience the Experiential Summit... Thank you!
Dani du Plessis
Showing posts with label keynote speaker. Show all posts
Showing posts with label keynote speaker. Show all posts
Monday, September 15, 2008
Monday, August 4, 2008
Interview with Kim
Kim Skildum-Reid heads up Power Sponsorship and is one of the world’s top corporate sponsorship consultants, trainers, speakers, and authors, with 22 years experience across the US, Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and Australasia.
Kim will be presenting a keynote speech on Last Generation Sponsorship at the African Experiential Marketing Summit on 3 September 2008, in Johannesburg. Marketing Mix managed to catch up with her for an interview.
Marketing Mix: Why is sponsorship so important in the marketing mix?
Kim Skildum-Reid: While other media are essentially one-way communications, best practice has gone beyond that, and beyond two-way communications, to become a true collaboration with and reflection of the sponsor’s target market. It has a degree of relevance and resonance that no other marketing media has or could have.
The reasoning is that a best practice sponsor understands, honours, and respects their target markets’ event experience and seeks to add value to that experience in a range of ways, thus becoming a valued and appreciated part of an experience that target market cares about. Contrasting that with traditional sponsorship, which is largely based on wallpapering logos all over the events and organisation these target markets have decided they care about, and disrespecting that experience with intrusive promotions and branding – electronic signage right next to the pitch, anyone? – and the value of best practice sponsorship becomes crystal clear.
MMX: How do you 'measure' ROI on sponsorships?
KSR: The short answer is, ‘you don’t’. Of course, that doesn’t mean you don’t measure the results; it simply means that the results will never be accurately measured using some kind of arbitrary dollar-value ratio.
The operative term for best practice sponsors is ROO – or Return-on-Objectives. This approach leaves behind the old-school approach of logo counting, media equivalencies, impressions, ‘good corporate citizenship’, and my personal favourite, ‘the halo effect’ and all of the hot air that goes into putting some kind of dollar value on these areas, and focuses on measuring strictly against objectives.
Seriously, what does it matter if a million people saw your logo if not one of them changes their perception or behaviour around you brand? It doesn’t. Not at all. Best practice is all about measuring changes in perceptions and behaviours. This is accomplished using two strategies:
Using your internal experts – Your sales department has a myriad of ways to measure sales, incremental sales, reorders, promotional support at retail, merchandising, promotional participation, coupon redemptions, and many dozens more objective-driven, benchmarked indicators. So do your PR, HR, loyalty marketing, electronic marketing, media, and other departments. Let the experts set the objectives and let them measure. You will get figures that will stand up to scrutiny against your company’s accepted benchmarks.
Research existing questions – Invest in some good research, but don’t invent questions. Use a selection of the same question that you are asking in your ongoing or most recent target market research, and then ask those questions of people with varying degrees of involvement with the event and your leverage program (eg event attendees, watch it on television, fans of the team, promotional participants, people who signed up for your event-driven web content, etc). The results will give you apples-to-apples comparisons against perception indicators your company has already decided are important.
(If you would like more information on measurement, please read Kim’s blog www.powersponsorship.com/blog.aspx#132)
MMX: How should a marketer go about initiating and maintaining a sponsorship?
KSR: The most important thing, going in, is to know exactly what you plan to do with it – how you are going to leverage it to achieve your objectives – and have the buy-in to make that happen.
If you sort that out before negotiation, you will negotiate for more strategic benefits and will fly out of the starting gate with your leverage programs. Plus, it is much easier to manage a sponsorship and keep internal stakeholders committed to leverage when you have buy-in before the commitment.
MMX: How can you make a sponsorship work with regards to integrating it with traditional and non-traditional media, or should it be standalone?
KSR: Buying sponsorship and not integrating it across all, or at least some, of your other marketing activities is like buying a ladder and never using it. Sponsorship is an opportunity. Leverage creates the results, and leverage starts with integration.
The only benefit a sponsor will get if they don’t integrate it across other marketing activities is a big fat ego trip.
MMX: How do you make a sponsorship really work for your brand - are there key elements that must exist for example?
KSR: It’s all about leverage, baby!
When a sponsor invests in a sponsorship, they are investing in opportunity. Leverage is what a sponsor does with the sponsorship, and that is what provides the results. There are no hard-and-fast rules for what a leverage program should look like, but there certainly is a new order of priorities.
First priority: Target market needs
If you ignore, or worse yet, disrespect, a target market’s needs, the sponsorship will not work for your brand. Your first priority is to understand those needs, wants, and challenges and then devise ways that you can help the target market to get what they want. If getting tickets is going to be nearly impossible, can you get early ticketing for your customers? If the ground is hard at the event, can you loan people cushions to sit on? This isn’t rocket science, yet sponsors rarely get it right.
Second priority: Internal buy-in
You can’t integrate sponsorship across other marketing activities unless you get buy-in and active involvement from a range of internal decision-makers. If you don’t have buy-in, your sponsorship will be much less effective and cost a lot more to leverage.
Third priority: Brand needs
Brand needs aren’t third because they’re unimportant. They’re third because you won’t get your target markets to change their perceptions and behaviours (in other words, to do what your marketing is trying to make them do) unless you meet their needs first. And you won’t be effective at leverage unless you get buy in.
Brand needs are important, you just have two critical hurdles to get over before you will be able to address them.
MMX: With respect to the upcoming 2010 FIFA World Cup and the fact that ambush marketing (should be) clamped down on, is there any advice?
KSR: No ‘shoulds’. It is impossible to ‘clamp down’ on ambush marketing. You can clamp down on people using IP illegally and you can inconvenience people who inadvertently wear a t-shirt with a non-sponsor logo on it to a game, but that’s not ambush marketing.
Ambush marketing is legal and there are no laws that can be passed to stop a committed strategic ambusher from gaining a marketing advantage and hurting a sponsor.
Strategic ambush is not about pretending you’re a sponsor. Frankly, consumers don’t really care who is and isn’t the sponsor. What they care about is who is making the event experience better, easier, or more enjoyable for them. Who understands and respects their event experience. If an ambusher does a better job at adding value to the event experience – understanding that the event experience doesn’t just happen when you’re sitting in a stadium – they will be successful.
That said, ambush marketing is easy to control, but the World Cup and laws aren’t going to do it. The only ones who can stop ambushers are the sponsors themselves. If they ensure that their programs are fully leveraged and that those leverage programs have been developed in such a way that real, meaningful benefits flow to the target markets and that their event experience is valued and respected.
Sponsors who expect laws and events to protect them from ambush marketing need education and they need to raise their game. If they aren’t interested in that, they’re lazy and deserve to be ambushed.
Interview contributed by Marketing Mix
Kim will be presenting a keynote speech on Last Generation Sponsorship at the African Experiential Marketing Summit on 3 September 2008, in Johannesburg. Marketing Mix managed to catch up with her for an interview.
Marketing Mix: Why is sponsorship so important in the marketing mix?
Kim Skildum-Reid: While other media are essentially one-way communications, best practice has gone beyond that, and beyond two-way communications, to become a true collaboration with and reflection of the sponsor’s target market. It has a degree of relevance and resonance that no other marketing media has or could have.
The reasoning is that a best practice sponsor understands, honours, and respects their target markets’ event experience and seeks to add value to that experience in a range of ways, thus becoming a valued and appreciated part of an experience that target market cares about. Contrasting that with traditional sponsorship, which is largely based on wallpapering logos all over the events and organisation these target markets have decided they care about, and disrespecting that experience with intrusive promotions and branding – electronic signage right next to the pitch, anyone? – and the value of best practice sponsorship becomes crystal clear.
MMX: How do you 'measure' ROI on sponsorships?
KSR: The short answer is, ‘you don’t’. Of course, that doesn’t mean you don’t measure the results; it simply means that the results will never be accurately measured using some kind of arbitrary dollar-value ratio.
The operative term for best practice sponsors is ROO – or Return-on-Objectives. This approach leaves behind the old-school approach of logo counting, media equivalencies, impressions, ‘good corporate citizenship’, and my personal favourite, ‘the halo effect’ and all of the hot air that goes into putting some kind of dollar value on these areas, and focuses on measuring strictly against objectives.
Seriously, what does it matter if a million people saw your logo if not one of them changes their perception or behaviour around you brand? It doesn’t. Not at all. Best practice is all about measuring changes in perceptions and behaviours. This is accomplished using two strategies:
Using your internal experts – Your sales department has a myriad of ways to measure sales, incremental sales, reorders, promotional support at retail, merchandising, promotional participation, coupon redemptions, and many dozens more objective-driven, benchmarked indicators. So do your PR, HR, loyalty marketing, electronic marketing, media, and other departments. Let the experts set the objectives and let them measure. You will get figures that will stand up to scrutiny against your company’s accepted benchmarks.
Research existing questions – Invest in some good research, but don’t invent questions. Use a selection of the same question that you are asking in your ongoing or most recent target market research, and then ask those questions of people with varying degrees of involvement with the event and your leverage program (eg event attendees, watch it on television, fans of the team, promotional participants, people who signed up for your event-driven web content, etc). The results will give you apples-to-apples comparisons against perception indicators your company has already decided are important.
(If you would like more information on measurement, please read Kim’s blog www.powersponsorship.com/blog.aspx#132)
MMX: How should a marketer go about initiating and maintaining a sponsorship?
KSR: The most important thing, going in, is to know exactly what you plan to do with it – how you are going to leverage it to achieve your objectives – and have the buy-in to make that happen.
If you sort that out before negotiation, you will negotiate for more strategic benefits and will fly out of the starting gate with your leverage programs. Plus, it is much easier to manage a sponsorship and keep internal stakeholders committed to leverage when you have buy-in before the commitment.
MMX: How can you make a sponsorship work with regards to integrating it with traditional and non-traditional media, or should it be standalone?
KSR: Buying sponsorship and not integrating it across all, or at least some, of your other marketing activities is like buying a ladder and never using it. Sponsorship is an opportunity. Leverage creates the results, and leverage starts with integration.
The only benefit a sponsor will get if they don’t integrate it across other marketing activities is a big fat ego trip.
MMX: How do you make a sponsorship really work for your brand - are there key elements that must exist for example?
KSR: It’s all about leverage, baby!
When a sponsor invests in a sponsorship, they are investing in opportunity. Leverage is what a sponsor does with the sponsorship, and that is what provides the results. There are no hard-and-fast rules for what a leverage program should look like, but there certainly is a new order of priorities.
First priority: Target market needs
If you ignore, or worse yet, disrespect, a target market’s needs, the sponsorship will not work for your brand. Your first priority is to understand those needs, wants, and challenges and then devise ways that you can help the target market to get what they want. If getting tickets is going to be nearly impossible, can you get early ticketing for your customers? If the ground is hard at the event, can you loan people cushions to sit on? This isn’t rocket science, yet sponsors rarely get it right.
Second priority: Internal buy-in
You can’t integrate sponsorship across other marketing activities unless you get buy-in and active involvement from a range of internal decision-makers. If you don’t have buy-in, your sponsorship will be much less effective and cost a lot more to leverage.
Third priority: Brand needs
Brand needs aren’t third because they’re unimportant. They’re third because you won’t get your target markets to change their perceptions and behaviours (in other words, to do what your marketing is trying to make them do) unless you meet their needs first. And you won’t be effective at leverage unless you get buy in.
Brand needs are important, you just have two critical hurdles to get over before you will be able to address them.
MMX: With respect to the upcoming 2010 FIFA World Cup and the fact that ambush marketing (should be) clamped down on, is there any advice?
KSR: No ‘shoulds’. It is impossible to ‘clamp down’ on ambush marketing. You can clamp down on people using IP illegally and you can inconvenience people who inadvertently wear a t-shirt with a non-sponsor logo on it to a game, but that’s not ambush marketing.
Ambush marketing is legal and there are no laws that can be passed to stop a committed strategic ambusher from gaining a marketing advantage and hurting a sponsor.
Strategic ambush is not about pretending you’re a sponsor. Frankly, consumers don’t really care who is and isn’t the sponsor. What they care about is who is making the event experience better, easier, or more enjoyable for them. Who understands and respects their event experience. If an ambusher does a better job at adding value to the event experience – understanding that the event experience doesn’t just happen when you’re sitting in a stadium – they will be successful.
That said, ambush marketing is easy to control, but the World Cup and laws aren’t going to do it. The only ones who can stop ambushers are the sponsors themselves. If they ensure that their programs are fully leveraged and that those leverage programs have been developed in such a way that real, meaningful benefits flow to the target markets and that their event experience is valued and respected.
Sponsors who expect laws and events to protect them from ambush marketing need education and they need to raise their game. If they aren’t interested in that, they’re lazy and deserve to be ambushed.
Interview contributed by Marketing Mix
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
Experiential expert in SA
Founder and director of Columbia Business School’s Center on Global Brand Management, Bernd H. Schmitt brings his wealth of expertise to South Africa at the 2nd African Experiential Marketing Summit in September.
As Robert D.Calkins Professor of International Business at Columbia Business School in New York, Schmitt is also CEO of The EX Group, a consulting firm focusing on innovation and customer experience. He has co-authored seven books, which have been translated into 16 languages, including Experiential Marketing, Customer Experience Management and Big Think Strategy.
At the African Experiential Marketing Summit, which will take place on 3 September at Monte Casino in Johannesburg, Schmitt will present his theories on why an attractive customer experience is critical for differentiating one’s brand, and illustrate how leading brands such as iPod, Mini and Singapore Airlines utilise experiential marketing.
Marketers will learn the power of engaging consumers on a sensory level and why experiential marketing is vital in creating brand equity. Other topics that will be presented include creating brand connections, African communications and sponsorships, among others.
Other keynote speakers at the event include Liz Bigham, Director of Brand Marketing at Jack Morton (US); Kim Skildum-Reid (Australian), leading authority on sponsorship marketing; and local expert, Dr Jan Hofmeyr, Global Head of Insights at Synovate and brand commitment specialist.
As Robert D.Calkins Professor of International Business at Columbia Business School in New York, Schmitt is also CEO of The EX Group, a consulting firm focusing on innovation and customer experience. He has co-authored seven books, which have been translated into 16 languages, including Experiential Marketing, Customer Experience Management and Big Think Strategy.
At the African Experiential Marketing Summit, which will take place on 3 September at Monte Casino in Johannesburg, Schmitt will present his theories on why an attractive customer experience is critical for differentiating one’s brand, and illustrate how leading brands such as iPod, Mini and Singapore Airlines utilise experiential marketing.
Marketers will learn the power of engaging consumers on a sensory level and why experiential marketing is vital in creating brand equity. Other topics that will be presented include creating brand connections, African communications and sponsorships, among others.
Other keynote speakers at the event include Liz Bigham, Director of Brand Marketing at Jack Morton (US); Kim Skildum-Reid (Australian), leading authority on sponsorship marketing; and local expert, Dr Jan Hofmeyr, Global Head of Insights at Synovate and brand commitment specialist.
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