Experiential Food Marketing – What is a Food Marketing Experience? When & Why it is Effective

An interesting marketing strategy that some food companies like food restaurants, food truck businesses and even retail food products have been using is an interactive and engaging marketing type known as experiential food marketing.

Experiential campaigns feel more like events and allow for food taste and sampling by the consumer. This can be a fun and immersive way to create a connection between your brand and your customer.

This way of promoting your food or drink product brings different levels of success depending on your industry segment. Let’s talk about this method in more depth and take a look at some examples of it in action.

What Is Experiential Marketing?

Often referred to by a variety of different names, like ‘engagement marketing’, ‘live marketing’ and ‘event marketing’, experiential marketing is a marketing strategy that involves directly engaging with consumers and encouraging them to take part in the evolution of either the brand or brand experience.

Instead of seeing consumers as merely passive recipients of marketing messages, experiential marketing teams believe consumers should have a direct and active role In marketing campaigns, as it helps to develop a stronger and more effective relationship with brands.

Examples of Experiential Food Marketing?

Experiential marketing is perfect for food marketing. Food brands have huge advantages over other companies in that their products have sensory advantages through smell and taste. Experiential marketing can help use those advantages to improve consumer engagement with food brands.

To stand out from the crowd, all your food brand needs to do is add a creative touch personal touch and a whole lot of creativity and you could have a memorable marketing campaign on your hands that will get your customers talking. And when customers are talking about you, they are not forgetting about you or going elsewhere.

To see the potential of experiential marketing, take a look at some of the best uses of this marketing style by some of the biggest brands in the world and their experiential marketing campaigns.

Instagram Packs

If you look through the most active Instagram users’ feeds, it often won’t take very long until you find at least one or two shots of food they’ve eaten.

With the rise in the foodie subculture and so-called food porn, there is no shortage of people out there snapping happily at their latest culinary adventures.

To take advantage of this need and desire to photograph everything that is served up to them, many restaurants have started to supply their diners with “Instagram packs”.

The theory is that if they are going to take pictures of their food, the restaurants may as well make it easier for their food to be showcased online in the best possible light.

In the average Instagram pack, you will often find a camera light, charger compatible with multiple devices, wide-angle camera lens and even a tripod to take those awkward overhead shots.

Anthon Berg at Copenhagen Airport

This is an interesting one and shows the lengths at which you may want to take to make sure your target audience has positive experiences of engaging with your brand.

The Danish master chocolatier, Anthon Berg came up with an ingenious and contentious experiential marketing strategy.

They created a sampling experience at the city’s airport where passengers were able to scan their boarding passes and were rewarded with a chocolate compensation pack.

Compensation for what? Well, the scan would reveal whether they had a good or bad seat on their flight. If they happened to luck out and had a good seat, they were presented with a smaller pack.

However, if they were unfortunate enough to get the worst seats on a flight, they were rewarded with a larger pack that not only included chocolates but eye masks and other things that would hopefully make their time in the air a little more enjoyable.

Milka

The chocolate brand Milka has always had somewhat whimsical and quirky marketing campaigns, even using more traditional channels.

It’s no surprise then that the company have been using experiential marketing to great effect, orchestrating activations that aim to bring consumers closer together.

Two sterling examples need to be highlighted – the company devised a vending machine activation experience in which people needed to hold hands to activate the vending machine and get chocolate.

Another saw the company purposely short-changing consumers by one square of chocolate. Why? To get people talking. How?

The customers who received a bar with a piece of chocolate missing could reclaim it through a specially-designed microsite and then send it on to a loved one!

Kellogg’s Recharge Bar

Kellogg’s have always been successful in their marketing exploits. Who doesn’t know Tony the Tiger?

As one of the most popular and successful cereal brands in the world, it’s no surprise that they would want to engage with their customers more effectively and directly using experiential marketing. One way they did this was when they set up a pop-up bar.

Everything about it celebrated cereal, from the décor to the music and social media-integrated karaoke booth.

There were also samples, obviously and one of the key points of the whole event was to show the endless, although often odd, possibilities you have with Kellogg’s cereal. The Pistachio Lemon, for instance.

McDonald’s McDrive Surprise

McDonald’s is another behemoth of the food marketing world and always seems to find ways to get people talking about the brand.

One way to make experiential marketing work for your brand is by creating an experience for your consumers that is surprising and offbeat. McDonald’s did this to great effect with their McDrive Surprise campaign.

A very funny and light-hearted prank, McDrive Surprise was devised to remind consumers of the brand’s personality.

In certain restaurants, the company replaced its staff with a whole host of eccentric and cheeky characters in full costume like wrestlers, opera singers and a couple who couldn’t keep their hands off one another.

Summary

Whether you are a new, up and coming food brand looking to make waves and get people talking or are a brand that has been around for some time and want consumers to see you with fresh eyes, experiential marketing is one way you can achieve those goals.

You can use it to draw consumers’ attention to a new product or product line, a special offer or introduce your brand or services to them.

It may take a lot of work, research and planning but if you get it right, you could reap the benefits like the brands we have listed above.