Feature: Experiential marketing: Train of events

Last month, in my piece on self-regulation, I touched briefly on the thorny issue of promotional staffing in the experiential industry, and this is one of the primary challenges facing our sector. As experiential marketing becomes more sophisticated and companies plough more of their budgets into the discipline, so the promotional staffing pool has to evolve with it.

In some ways, we have probably made a rod for our own backs, raising the bar in terms of client expectations in this area, if nothing else by simply referring to these people as brand ambassadors and not promotional staff. We are the ones telling clients these people are responsible for communicating their values and that they will embody their brand. We now need to rise to that challenge and deliver against what we say and look at how we can push the quality of the people we deliver.

However, the rather bleak reality is that promotional staff are a much maligned aspect of live event marketing, with many marketers – and indeed agencies – viewing them as an after-thought. Rarely are they considered a vital aspect of any campaign. The very people representing the industry at its most crucial consumer touch points are, sadly, often its most neglected. Some agencies are even still providing the same staff with the same briefing process as they did five to 10 years ago. Unless this changes, the experiential industry will be seriously hampered in its ability to deliver ever more thoughtful and complicated campaigns.

Street wise

With potentially hundreds of people out on the streets representing a brand and saying what they want to consumers about that brand, a certain level of capability is essential. With printed or above-the-line advertising you can have a third party watch or read every bit and pass judgement on its suitability. But, however tightly you brief promotional people, they are human beings and can potentially deviate from any given script. This is something, I believe, that companies will and should start to pay more attention to. But if they continue to view their brand ambassadors as a commodity that can be purchased as cheaply as possible, they are very likely to come unstuck on this front.

Few clients seem to be aware of the damage that bad ambassadors can do to their brand, yet they all seem to want the best quality of promotional staff but want to drive down the price. Human beings can’t be treated like robots, but we will have to ensure that they work within certain guidelines, which raises questions about the people you have as field staff. Being able to do this requires a certain level of competence, which in turn demands a certain rate of pay and level of training. With the level of money being pumped into experiential marketing and its growing importance as a medium of communications with audiences, it is becoming even more important that our customer-facing staff are educated in the marketing processes that lie behind their own role and position.

When we worked with The Big Kick to deliver the Great British Bean Poll for Branston we were faced with competitor brands threatening to send out undercover journalists to check what our promotional staff were doing and saying, so we had to be very careful how we briefed them. We needed to be sure they referred to the competitor product in a certain way and were aware of certain phrases or words that they could and couldn’t say. Although this was particular to this job, this has been a valuable learning process for us and we now adopt similar principles with all our campaigns.

Right level of education

If promotional staff are to be developed and incorporated as a key component of an experiential marketing strategy, they need to be educated not only in the brand values of a particular campaign but also in the strategy, objectives and rationale behind each campaign they promote. In effect, promotional staff must be incorporated into the marketing ethos and psychology underpinning the brand.

This is exactly the reason we created our ground-breaking Event Management training programme with the co-operation of the University of Greenwich. The short course is accredited by the Institute of Commercial Management and offers full-time brand ambassadors basic operational skills such as health and safety but also more commercial skills such as negotiation, presentation, how to manage a team, answering consumer feedback and even managing clients effectively when out in the field. The final part of the training is a 1,500-word written assessment that all staff have to successfully complete in order to obtain certification.

The course gives attendees an insight into the marketing strategies and psychology that underpin particular campaigns. Moreover, it allows them the opportunity to give and share their own advice and information. This ensures that experiential agencies which participate in the course have to listen and take their promotional staff’s views on board. This two-way flow of information is important because as campaigns become more sophisticated the feedback from promotional staff is needed to ensure that the campaign objectives are actually achievable in the field.

Making a difference

The first course ran in September 2006 and it has proved a success and of great benefit to our promotional staff. It’s also of great benefit to other agencies too – we’re not naive enough to think these people don’t work for other agencies as we designed the course for those in the profession for the long term. Those that have been on the course say it is really helping to make a tangible difference in performance and a very real impact.

The days of customer-facing staff being an after-thought is no longer sustainable if our sector wants to be taken seriously both by big brands wanting large-scale experiential campaigns and by our peers in other marketing sectors. Set standards as to the care and training of promotional staff will be invaluable not just to the agencies and staff themselves, but also to purchasing departments and companies who will know that they are buying into a defined quality of staffing.