Brand activations – Knowing your Customer

Vaughan Berry, Director: Provantage Media Group outlines the reasons that brand activations need to be about the consumer, not just about the brand.

Activations have a fundamental place within the marketing mix. In essence, they allow a brand to engage directly with a consumer so that they start to believe in the brand.  If implemented effectively, activations can create excitement and cause the consumer to react precisely how you want them to react – be it through a product purchase, signing up for a service or joining a community.

A good activation has the ability to create sustainable and engaging customer relationships. As marketers, we know our brand, we know what it represents and we should know who we are targeting. And we should be acutely aware of the latter at all times, in fact right from the inception of the activations idea.

Brands need to do their research and create activations that provide an authentic emotional engagement and can shift perceptions, if need be. Activations allow your brand to communicate face to face with your consumer, so they should result in positive feelings around the brand in order for consumers to become loyal customers.

When you get to the core of it, the objective of an activations campaign is to motivate consumers to move to the next stage quicker than they would on their own. In a campaign, a consumer can be persuaded to reach a decision in less time and brand ambassadors need to harness this time frame to reach positive results. Why? Because activations provide the opportunity to convince consumers to become a first-time customer, a repeat customer or a brand advocate. The point here is that every customer can always become a better customer. The challenge to marketers is to continuously activate and engage with every customer effectively.

In order to do so, brands and activations teams need to do the following:

1. Know customers deeply – their personality, their likes, dislikes and their behaviours
2. Create the right activations campaigns to move them forward
3. Drive each customer towards a measurable goal  - be it opening a bank account, purchasing a product or joining a mailing list

If these 3 simple steps are at the core of each stage of creating an activation, then you’re on the road to success.

To find out how ProActive™ can activate your marketing needs, call Peter Kohlӧffel  on 0861 776 826 or go to www.provantage.co.za or follow @ProvantageSA