Marketing activation plays a crucial role in the strategy of companies seeking to create meaningful interactions with their target audience. By implementing concrete, engaging actions, marketing activation aims to stimulate consumer engagement, boost brand awareness and generate measurable results.
Today, Sidely explores the different dimensions of marketing activation, its benefits for businesses and the best practices for maximizing its effectiveness in an ever-changing economy. We conclude with three historical examples that have left their mark and continue to inspire brands around the world.
Marketing activation, also known as brand activation, refers to the tactics and strategies implemented by a company to engage and encourage consumers to interact with its brand, products or services. This usually involves activities designed to stimulate interest, recognition and commitment among potential or existing customers.
Marketing activation techniques can take many forms:
The main objective is to create memorable and positive experiences for consumers, in order to strengthen their relationship with the brand and increase sales, brand loyalty and awareness. For companies positioned in a niche or innovative market, marketing activation also promotes consumer education, offering hands-on experiences that enable consumers to learn more about the brand's products or services in a fun and interactive way.
One of the aims of activation is to align customers' perception of the brand with the brand's identity (its mission and objectives). In other words, the company seeks to ensure that the way its products and services are perceived by consumers corresponds to the image and positioning it wishes to develop in its market.
The task is generally made more complex by competition, but also by the difficulty of deploying a coherent communication strategy and consistent field actions. For example, a brand may seek to boost sales by running very attractive price promotions. But in doing so, it risks damaging its brand image, as consumers associate discounts with the notion of "low-end". The brand's entire market positioning is at stake.
💡 Another typical example: an advertising message whose reception differs completely from its objectives. In 2017, an advertising video for a Dove shower gel caused worldwide controversy. It showed a black woman removing her t-shirt to reveal a white woman, then a brunette woman with a matte complexion. The footage was criticized as racist, suggesting the whitening of black skin. Under the hashtag #BoycottDove, Internet users called for a boycott of Dove products. Under pressure, the brand withdrew the video and issued an apology. This illustrates how bad buzz can damage a company's reputation despite its initial intentions.
This is why communications agencies are usually involved in activation strategies. They master the art of the brand platform, guaranteeing the coherence of the story a company wants to tell through its marketing and communications.
In order to win over the target audience and create a lasting bond with the brand, the aim is generally to touch consumers on an emotional level. Once the message has been clearly defined, creativity is the key to translating it into operational marketing campaigns. This is known as experiential or sensorial marketing, because triggering emotion involves mobilizing every sensory activity in the customer. This explains why field actions play such an important role in activation. To find out more, discover the best sales animation techniques.
However, although activation has traditionally been concentrated on actions in the field, and particularly at the point of sale, substantial budgets are now being allocated to running advertising campaigns on the various digital platforms. This is because, unlike traditional channels such as television, social networks provide an extremely powerful segmentation capability, enabling brands to target their audiences ultra-efficiently.
Digital thus makes it possible to increase the impact of marketing activation at lower cost, notably through the repetition of advertising messages to engaged web users via modern tracking tools. Social media activation has become an integral part of a brand's activation strategy, helping it to achieve its objectives in terms of reach (reaching consumers) and engagement (interactions on social networks).
These two terminologies are very similar, and the corresponding actions are often interchangeable. However, a distinction can be made in terms of temporality. Marketing activation focuses on engaging consumers in the short term, while brand activation aims to strengthen the long-term relationship and perception between the brand and its target audience.
Successful activation in supermarkets requires mastery of all aspects of the marketing mix: product, positioning, distribution policy, communication and performance monitoring... while taking into account the specific characteristics of the market and consumer expectations!
But that's not all: knowing the impact of activation campaigns on sales is often complicated. For example, brands may find it difficult to correlate the impact of city-center test campaigns for a new chocolate bar, and the evolution of in-store sales?
In such cases, it's a good idea to send your area managers out to representative stores to assess stock and shelf space, ideally with a before/after comparison. As with promotions, an upward difference in sales implies that the operation has worked.
💡 To track the effectiveness of your in-store activation devices and enable your sector managers to report all the information from their statements in just a few clicks, discover our GMS statement application.
In the retail sector, the term "point-of-sale activation" is also used to designate all the measures taken by a brand to reinforce its performance at store level. This includes merchandising, sales events and promotional operations.
While in-store activation is primarily designed to boost or revitalize sales, it also makes it possible to stimulate distributors by being proactive in the commercial relationship. This collaboration is fully in line with the logic of trade marketing.
This is a particularity of indirect selling: activation cannot be defined as a relationship between the brand and its target audience, but involves a third party: the distributor. Marketing therefore needs to take this parameter into account, and work on its campaigns bearing in mind that the point of sale can itself be loaded with brand image issues. In other words, when a customer chooses to shop in a particular store, his or her experience is largely shaped by the retailer's strategy (price, quality, available offer, etc.).
Let's imagine, for example, that your food brand is distributed by two chains: Monoprix, which does a lot of exclusive work with brands chosen for their differentiation, and Intermarché, which "fights against the high cost of living". You could then adapt your activation campaign to take account of these specificities and their impact on shoppers' psychology:
Finally, let's take a look at some of the brands that have left their mark on the history of communications with dazzling activation campaigns.
In 2012, Red Bull launched the Red Bull Stratos initiative, in which extreme athlete Felix Baumgartner made a parachute jump from the stratosphere. This spectacular campaign generated enormous media attention and engaged consumers around the world, reinforcing Red Bull's reputation as a brand associated with daring and innovation.
Nike launched its Nike+ FuelBand campaign in 2012, offering a connected wristband that allowed users to track and measure their daily physical activity. The campaign encouraged consumers to adopt an active lifestyle while reinforcing engagement with the Nike brand by integrating wearable technology into their daily routine.
In 2011, Coca-Cola launched its "Share a Coke" campaign, replacing the brand logo on its bottles with popular first names. This personalization encouraged consumers to search for their own first names or those of their loved ones, creating a sense of belonging and sharing around the Coca-Cola brand. The campaign was a worldwide success, increasing consumer engagement and boosting sales.
