Stop entertaining people. Start selling.
11 min. reading
Brands spend millions every year on festivals, events and activations. They build stages, bars, photo booths, games and interactive installations. People come, play, take a selfie, grab some merch and leave.
Then comes the post-event report. Thousands of visitors. Thousands of interactions. Millions of impressions. Great dwell time. Hundreds or thousands of leads.
All those numbers can be useful. But none of them, on their own, answers the most important question:
What did it actually do for the business?
11 MIN · A BRAND EXPERIENCE MASTERCLASS
A thousand people in your zone doesn’t mean a thousand new customers. It doesn’t even necessarily mean one more product sold.
A packed zone can look like a huge success in photos and in the post-event report, while changing almost nothing about how people perceive, use or buy your product.
And this is exactly where much of today’s event marketing reaches its limits.
Getting people to your brand and entertaining them isn’t enough. You need to understand why people want your product in the first place, then turn its essence into something they want to experience, try, share, use... and ultimately buy.
Because Brand Experience isn’t built around the product. It grows from it.
Your Brand Is Not a Circus
A brand isn’t a circus that rolls into town just to entertain people.
And after all, even a circus sells tickets.
Of course we want people to have fun. Entertainment is an incredibly powerful part of experience design. But for a brand, entertainment is a means, not a business objective.
If you’re a brewery, the question isn’t just whether people liked your bar. The more interesting question is whether the experience gave them a reason to choose your beer, try another variant or have one more.
If you’re a bank, the question isn’t how many people danced under your branded stage. The question is what they walked away with. Did they learn something new about your product? Do they want to use it? Did they become your customers?
And if you sell cars, maybe you don’t even need to invent an attraction to put next to the car.
You already have one.
The car.
Let people drive it. Let them feel it, hear it and discover what makes it different.
The goal isn’t for them to walk away remembering a great event.
The goal is for them to want the car.
A Full Zone Isn’t Necessarily a Successful Zone
There’s nothing wrong with a photo booth, a DJ, a game or beautiful festival architecture. They can attract attention, increase the time people spend with your brand and create a space where people genuinely enjoy being.
But that doesn’t necessarily mean they change customer behaviour.
Imagine a beverage brand at a festival. You can paint the bar green, blue, purple or pink. You can make it beautiful, add decorations, a game and create the most photogenic hangout at the entire festival.
You’ve significantly improved the environment around the product.
But if someone who would normally have two drinks still has two, what exactly have you changed from a sales perspective?
Superficial fun can attract attention. But attention alone doesn’t create new customers.
People can spend more time in your zone, take photos, share it and have a great time without gaining a single new reason to want your product.
That doesn’t necessarily make it a bad event.
But it’s a damn expensive way to entertain people.
Stop Bribing People with Entertainment Just to Make Them Notice the Product
A large share of brand activations still works on the same principle.
We create a game, competition, photo point, challenge or tech-driven attraction. We pull people into the brand space. We give them merch or a sample in exchange for interacting, maybe ask for their email. And somewhere in the middle of all that sits the actual product.
The logic is simple: if we get enough people to stop and interact, hopefully some of that attention will translate into a relationship with the brand and, eventually, perhaps even into sales.
Sometimes it does.
But there’s a huge gap between “they interacted with us” and “they want to buy us.”
And that gap is exactly where the difference between an event and Brand Experience lies.
An event can create interaction. Brand Experience needs to give that interaction commercial meaning.
Instead of asking how to make the environment around the product more entertaining, we should be asking:
What can we do with the product itself to make people want it more?
Because attention isn’t desire.
And interaction isn’t purchase.
We connect people with brands.
We design what customers experience with them.
We turn experiences into business results.
Start with the Product
Brand Experience shouldn’t start with the question:
What cool thing can we build here?
It should start with questions about the product itself.
Why do people buy it in the first place? What is its DNA? What need does it fulfil? Where does its value come from? What makes it different? When do people use it? What do they love about it? And what stops them from buying it more often?
And then comes the most interesting question:
How can we change the way people experience the product so they want it more, buy it more often or are willing to pay more for it?
This is strategic work that needs to happen before we start designing the event itself.
Too many activations still work like this:
BRAND → ENTERTAINMENT → ATTENTION → ??? → SALES
And those three question marks are where huge amounts of marketing money disappear.
Product-led Brand Experience works differently:
PRODUCT DNA → EXPERIENCE → BEHAVIOUR CHANGE → BUSINESS EFFECT
Don’t start by inventing entertainment and then try to bolt the product onto it.
The experience has to grow from within the product.
ING the thing
Pine and Gilmore call this “ING-ing the thing” in the Experience Economy.
The principle is surprisingly simple: stop thinking about the product as a noun for a moment and start thinking about what people do with it.
Selling paddles? Paddle.
Selling cars? Drive.
Selling beer? Drink.
Because some of the product’s strongest benefits are often hidden in the experience of using it, along with the experience you can build from it.
Don’t just impress people with your brand.
Let them experience what its product promises.
- What does Product Experience look like in practice? Explore Pepsi House of Treats. →
Don’t Sell Another 7UP. Give People Another Reason to Drink One.
PepsiCo offers a great example of experience-led marketing thinking.
There’s a natural limit to how many of the same soft drinks someone wants to have in a single day. Very few people wake up in the morning thinking they’d like to have three 7UPs today.
So the brand asked a different question:
How can we create more reasons to have another drink throughout the day?
Instead of adding more entertainment around the brand, it turned the product itself into the foundation for multisensory mocktails. New flavours, ingredients, textures and boba were added. The serve changed, giving people something different to discover each time.
Suddenly, having six or seven different drinks throughout the day doesn’t seem unusual.
And every one of them contains 7UP or Pepsi. At a significantly higher price point, too.
The experience didn’t give people another reason to visit the brand.
It gave them another reason to consume its product.
And that directly increased consumption frequency.
Only then was the entertaining HoT – House of Treats concept built around it. Design, service, social moments, entertainment and content amplify the core idea and give people a reason to photograph it, film it and share it.
And something else changes here, too. Brands often focus on which influencer to pay to talk about their activation. But when the experience itself is compelling enough, people and creators start sharing it on their own.
And all of that is built around the product. Entertainment doesn’t create the experience.
It simply amplifies the experience that has already grown from the product itself.
We connect people with brands.
We design what customers experience with them.
We turn experiences into business results.
A Vending Machine Is Still Just a Vending Machine
With FMCG, this problem is perhaps easiest to see.
You can make a vending machine as creative as you like. It can be beautiful, interactive or AI-powered. It can read facial expressions, ask about your mood or even have a robotic arm hand you the product.
It’s still a vending machine.
And there’s nothing wrong with that. It can be a smart way to distribute samples, attract attention and create a short interaction with the brand. But we shouldn’t confuse that interaction with Brand Experience of the product itself.
The real question isn’t how creatively we delivered the product, but what part of its essence we allowed people to experience.
If, for example, the essence of a product is “thank you”, then the most interesting question isn’t how to dispense the chocolate more creatively. A far more interesting question is how to create a reason and an opportunity for someone to actually say thank you, with the product becoming part of that moment.
At that point, the product is no longer a reward at the end of an unrelated interaction.
It becomes the reason for the interaction.
Of course, a vending machine can be part of a great Brand Experience. But making product distribution more interactive doesn’t automatically turn the product itself into an experience.
If all I do is press a button, get something for free and walk away, we’ve simply invented a more entertaining way to give the product away for free.
- When you understand the context your product will live in, you can change the product itself. adidas took that idea literally for Oktoberfest. →
Selling Shoes? Turn Them Into Something People Really Want.
Brand Experience doesn’t always mean building a space for people to come to.
Sometimes, you can change the product itself.
A great example is the collaboration between adidas Originals and Berlin’s public transport company BVG. Together, they created a limited-edition EQT Support 93/Berlin sneaker inspired by the visual identity of Berlin’s public transport system. The shoes also came with an annual BVG travel pass.
Suddenly, you weren’t just buying another pair of sneakers.
You were buying a piece of Berlin. A cultural symbol. A collector’s item. And at the same time, a product that delivered very tangible everyday value.
The value of the product was no longer just in the shoes themselves.
And that’s exactly the point.
If you sell shoes, you don’t necessarily need to build a competition, photo point or attraction around them. Think about what you can do with the shoes themselves to make people want them more. To make them more valuable. To make people willing to pay more for them. And ideally, to give them something ordinary shoes simply can’t.
adidas didn’t build an experience around the sneakers.
It put the experience directly into them.
And that gives us another simple test for Brand Experience:
Could you replace your logo with another brand’s logo and the entire activation would still make just as much sense?
If so, you may have created an entertaining activation.
But you probably haven’t yet found the Brand Experience hidden inside your product.
Are You a Bank? Let People Bank.
With financial brands, this problem is particularly visible.
Banks invest significant budgets in festival sponsorships. They build impressive stages, lounges, VIP zones, games and beautifully designed spaces.
And people can genuinely have a great time there.
If the goal is awareness, hospitality or rewarding existing customers, that can make perfect sense. But if the goal is acquisition or growth, we should expect much more.
Imagine someone who has spent an hour under a bank’s branded stage and is now walking away.
What did they learn about its products? Did they try any of its services? Did they open an account? Did their perception of the bank change?
Do they even remember which bank sponsored the stage?
And yet banks have one of the most interesting materials imaginable for experience design:
Money.
Payments. Accounts. Cards. Cashback. Currency exchange. Savings. Credit.
Why not make them part of the festival experience?
A festival currency. A festival account. A wallet. A new payment mechanism. A store. A rewards system. A service that makes buying things at the festival easier.
The specific idea isn’t important.
The principle is.
If you’re a bank, let people experience banking.
Don’t just put your logo above an experience someone else created.
Are You an Insurance Company? Then Insure Me.
Insurance offers exactly the same opportunity.
The product is protection against risk. A promise that if something goes wrong, someone will be there to help.
That already contains an experience in itself.
Imagine arriving at a festival and being able to buy a small festival insurance policy. Against rain. A soaked tent. Lost sunglasses. Even something deliberately absurd, like insurance against getting stung by a bee.
You pay a small amount. And if it happens, you get something useful or fun in return. A rain poncho, breakfast, festival credit, merch or another relevant benefit.
Now compare that with a branded game. In the first case, the person didn’t interact with an insurance company’s activation.
They just got insured.
They understood the product by experiencing it. They registered. They paid. The insurance company gained a customer and established the first transactional relationship.
And if you design it well, it can still be funny, beautiful, shareable and entertaining.
But this time, we didn’t wrap the product in entertainment.
The entertainment grew from the product itself.
We connect people with brands.
We design what customers experience with them.
We turn experiences into business results.
What Does Your Customer Walk Away With?
People can love your activation without loving your product. They can take photos of your zone and still not remember your brand. They can spend an hour under your stage and walk away without learning a single new thing about what you actually sell.
That’s why perhaps the simplest test of any Brand Experience is to imagine one specific person who is just leaving your zone.
For a moment, forget about footfall, dwell time, impressions and the number of selfies created.
What do they walk away with?
Do they know something about the product they didn’t know before? Did they experience it? Discover a new way to use it? Do they want it more? Did they buy it? Consume more than they normally would? Open an account? Get insured? Are they willing to pay more for it?
And then there’s a second, equally important question:
How has their perception of the brand changed?
Does it now feel more relevant? More innovative? More premium? More useful? More trustworthy? Have we shifted their perception in a direction that actually matters to the brand’s positioning?
Or did they simply have a great time, take a selfie, grab some merch and leave?
That doesn’t necessarily make it a bad event.
But it’s a damn expensive way to entertain people.
But We Got Thousands of Leads
Lead generation is another popular answer to the question of commercial value. And yes, acquiring relevant contacts can be incredibly valuable.
But a contact isn’t a customer.
The real question is what happens next.
What happens to those thousands of leads on Monday morning? Who contacts them? With what? When? What do we know about them? And how will their experience continue after the event?
Too often, the event ends, the report is sent, the Excel file is handed over to another department, and the contacts gradually disappear somewhere in the system.
We’ve experienced situations ourselves where we actively wanted to buy a client’s product, expressed genuine interest, and their sales representative still hadn’t contacted us a year later. Meanwhile, the company continued investing money in acquiring more leads.
That’s not a customer journey.
That’s a box ticked.
If the purchase can’t happen during the experience, the experience needs to create a clear next step.
The event can end. The customer journey can’t.
Sponsorship Faces the Same Challenge
We should ask a similar question about sponsorship. Brands invest huge amounts of money to be visible where their customers are. And that can make perfect sense.
Sponsorship can work brilliantly for awareness, hospitality, relationship building or as a reward for existing customers. If that’s the goal, there’s nothing wrong with it.
The problem starts when we expect the same investment to drive growth and acquire new customers, while the way we activate the brand remains exactly the same.
Being visible isn’t the same as giving someone a reason to buy from you.
Rewarding people who already know your brand is very different from convincing someone new to try it, start using it or buy it.
Both are legitimate goals.
They just require different strategies.
So if the objective is acquisition, trial, higher frequency, perceived value or sales, brand presence alone isn’t enough.
The product needs a role to play.
The Four Es. And One More.
At the heart of the Experience Economy is a useful framework developed by B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore. It describes four realms of experience, known as the 4Es.
Entertainment is about enjoyment. The experience captures our attention and gives us something we want to watch, listen to or enjoy.
Education means we walk away knowing or being able to do something we couldn’t before. The experience teaches us something.
Escapism goes further. We’re no longer simply watching. We actively step into the experience and become part of it.
And Esthetics is about being in an environment we want to inhabit. We want to stay, take it in, photograph it or simply enjoy being part of it.
These four dimensions are a great way to think about the richness of an experience.
But when we apply them to Brand Experience, there is one more question we need to ask.
And it’s a question every marketer, event director, brand manager and creative partner should be asking.
Effect
What changed because of the experience?
Did people’s perception of the brand change? Did they understand the product better? Did its perceived value increase? Did they try it? Consume more of it? Did we gain a new customer?
Because it’s entirely possible to create an experience that is entertaining, educational, escapist and aesthetically fantastic... while creating surprisingly little commercial value for the brand paying for it.
And Effect is exactly what’s missing from so many of today’s briefs and brand activations.
Not as another metric in the post-event report.
But as the starting point for the entire design.
What do we want to change?
Only when we know that can we use Entertainment, Education, Escapism and Esthetics to actually create that change.
We connect people with brands.
We design what customers experience with them.
We turn experiences into business results.
Start with Effect. Design through the 4Es.
And that’s exactly why Brand Experience doesn’t start with designing a space, choosing a technology or planning a programme. It starts with understanding the product, its customers, the category, barriers to purchase and the customer journey.
That’s no longer just production work.
It’s strategy.
Effect isn’t something a brand should have to justify to the Sales Director at the end. It’s the reason the experience exists in the first place.
None of this diminishes the importance of event production. A great strategy executed badly will still create a bad experience. But stage design, technology, catering, staffing, architecture and entertainment all come later.
And if that strategic foundation is missing, there’s a perfectly legitimate question to ask:
Could we have invested that money in growth more effectively?
Stop Building Superficial Fun Around Products
The product isn’t there to sponsor the experience.
The product is the experience.
Find out why it’s worth buying.
Find its DNA.
And turn it into something worth experiencing.
Sources:
- Pine, B. Joseph II & Gilmore, James H. The Experience Economy: Competing for Customer Time, Attention, and Money
- adidas: Eater.com
- PepsiCo: House of Treats
Author
Jiri Machacek
CEO & Chief Brand Strategist ✓ Certified Experience Economy Expert