Episode Summary

Experiential marketing is a tactic businesses use to promote their brands through face to face interaction with their customers. Live, branded events tend to have a much bigger impact on audiences than traditional advertising—helping companies build brand awareness, encourage brand loyalty and generate word of mouth.

The goal of branded experiential marketing events is to form an emotional connection with your audience. Intense emotions turn into memories which influence future actions. A positive memory of an event could decide whether someone sends their child to your district or votes in favor of your bond.

While K12 education lacks the same resources as private sector marketers, the fact is that schools have one major advantage over them: you already regularly interface with your audience at live events, be they football games or graduation ceremonies.

In this episode, we’ll discuss what sets successful experiential marketing campaigns apart from other events, how experiential marketing can benefit schools and ways K-12 leaders can leverage experiential marketing tactics to level up your events and create lasting memories.

Episode Notes

Experiential marketing started with flash mobs and has since become the cutting edge of advertising. Live branded events that are interactive, multi-sensory and emotionally resonant have a much greater pull on audiences than other forms of marketing. That’s why it’s so important K-12 leaders think about how they can adapt experiential marketing tactics for their own use.

In this episode, we’ll share what experiential marketing is exactly, why it’s so effective, and ways schools can use it to improve their brands. 

Featured in this episode are Layne Braunstein, William D. Parker, Zhecho Dobrev and Sherese Nix. 

Max Lenderman is the author of Experience the Message: How Experiential Marketing is Changing the Brand World. 

Listen to William D. Parker’s podcast, Principal Matters on Apple Podcasts. 

Zhecho Dobrev is the author of The Big Miss: How Organizations Overlook the Value of Emotions. 

Visit SchoolCEO’s website for more information about our research 

A Seat at the Table

 and 

Layers of Leadership

Episode Transcript

Layne Braunstein: Dead advertising is dead, but live advertising is exploding. And it's called experiential. An active, live, multi-sensory engagement to me creates the most memorable and honest experience.

Eileen Beard: Welcome to the SchoolCEO Podcast. I'm your host, Eileen Beard. You just heard Layne Braunstein, a Cannes Lions and Clio-winning creative known for engineering experiential marketing events for companies such as Google, BMW, and Nike. 

In Season 3 of the podcast, we're giving you a comprehensive guide to school marketing, taking successful lessons from other industries you can apply to K12 leadership. So far, we've covered brand, marketing, communication, and organizational culture.

Today, as you may have guessed, we're going to turn a spotlight on a specific kind of marketing called experiential. 

What is experiential marketing? 

Sometimes referred to as live marketing or engagement marketing, experiential is a popular tactic businesses use to build their brands through face to face connection with their audiences. Customers who participate in a positive branded experience develop a strong and lasting connection to that brand. 

Let's go back in time a little bit for context. 

Remember the flash mobs that began popping up on every corner in the early 2000? If you haven't witnessed one in person, you've probably seen videos on YouTube, such as this one. 

[clip of Flash Mob]

If you can't tell what's going on there, a crowd of rush hour passengers at Victoria Place train station in London are just going about a seemingly normal day when a Bruno Mars song starts to play, and the people next to them pop out from the crowd to perform a synchronized choreographed dance. Everyone stops in their tracks – no pun intended. Kids jump up and down and point while their parents start taking photos and videos on their phones. These flash mobs were the first big boom in experiential marketing. They engaged multiple senses and were interactive. Those dancers weren't on a stage, they were amongst their audience. More importantly, they packed an emotional punch, both surprising and delighting the unwitting crowd. The corporate world saw how these crowds responded and began engineering flash mobs to promote their brands. Since then, experiential marketing has grown quite sophisticated. 

Here's Layne Braunstein again describing some of his own work in experiential marketing.

Layne Braunstein: Let's say you go to an event and there's a bar with some influencers there. There's, some local fashion designers putting some stuff on the wall, and there's some cool eighties movies being projected on the wall. That's an event, and it's a pretty cool event, but it's just an event. But if you go to an event, and there are some influencers at the bar, and they wanna play some cool video games with you to create some custom cocktails. And then you walk up to some local fashion designers, and they each give you a spray can. And then you and the fashion designer spray paint all the clothes, and you get to take it home with you. And then when you look at eighties movies projected on the wall, you see your face instantly in all of them. That's experiential, and it's super cool.

While you might not have the technology to insert the faces of your guests into an eighties movie, there are experiential marketing tactics that are scalable to schools. For instance, former principal and host of the Principal Matters, William D. Parker, used a similar tactic to make his students feel seen. At lunch, his team would play short videos spotlighting some of their students. “I would see them talking at the tables with their friends, but their eyes would unerringly float back to the TV screen,” Parker tells us.

William D. Parker: I would notice while they were eating breakfast or hanging out that their eyes would almost always gravitate back toward that screen when they saw themselves Uh-huh. Or they saw a classmate being showcased. And sometimes they would elbow somebody and say, hey, look, you're on there.

Likewise, you probably can't hire fashion designers to show up to your event. But you can definitely get students or even parents involved in spray painting mural or old uniforms to create a collage. 

So now let's talk about why experiential marketing is so important to your schools. 

In season 2 episode 7 of the hit TV series The Bear, one of the characters is working in the dining room of the fanciest, most exclusive restaurants in Chicago when she overhears the table of diners express dismay. They ate at all these wonderful restaurants, but they didn't get a chance to try a Chicago deep dish pizza.

[start of clip from The Bear]

Character #1: Guest on 9, Emily overheard her tell her family that she was bummed that she was leaving Chicago without getting a chance to try deep dish.

Character #2: Got it. Thank you. Slow down. 89. Surprise on 9.

Character #1: What's the surprise?

Character #2: Take a wild guess.

Character #1: You're gonna make them deep dish.

[end of clip from The Bear]

If you've watched the show, you know what happens next. But did you know it's based on a true story? Here's Will Guidara, the former owner and operator of Eleven Madison Park in New York City, which was consistently voted one of the 50 best restaurants in the world.

Will Guidara: In early 2010, on a busier than normal lunch service, I was in the dining room helping out the servers when I found myself clearing appetizers from a table of 4 foodies on vacation to New York. And they were going to the airport to head back home after their meal. I overheard them talking. What an amazing trip. We've been to all the best restaurants. And they listed a bunch. Per Se, La Bernadine, Danielle, Momofuku. Now Eleven Madison Park. Then another person jumped in. Yeah. But the only thing we didn't get to try was a New York City hot dog. You know those moments in a cartoon where the animated light bulb goes off over the character's head, signifying they're about to come up with a really good idea? If you'd been in the room with me that day, you would have seen one appear over mine. 

Will Guidara: As calmly as I possibly could, I walked gracefully back into the kitchen, dropped off the plates, and then literally ran out the front door and down the block to the hot dog cart. I bought a hot dog and ran just as fast back into the kitchen. Now came the hard part convincing the chef to serve it in our fancy fine dining restaurant. Because he looked at me like I'd lost my mind, serving what New Yorkers call a dirty water dog in a fancy 4 star restaurant. But I asked him to trust me. And I told him it was important to me. And eventually, he agreed to cut the hot dog up into 4 perfect pieces, adding a little swoosh of ketchup and a swoosh of mustard onto each plate and finishing them with a canel of sauerkraut and a canel of relish. Then, before we served to the table their final savory course, which happened to be a honey lavender glazed Muscovy duck that had been dry aged for 2 weeks utilizing a technique that had taken years to perfect, we brought them their hot dog. I introduced it. 

Will Guidara: To make sure you don't go home with any culinary regrets, a New York City hot dog. Guys, they freaked out. I'm not kidding. At that point in my career, I had served 1,000 of dishes and many, many, many 1,000 of dollars' worth of food. And I can confidently say that no one had ever reacted to anything I served them better than they reacted to that hot dog. Each person said it was not only the highlight of their meal but of their entire trip to New York, and they'd be telling the story for the rest of their lives.

The year after the hot dog story heard round the world, Eleven Madison Park clinched the number one spot on the list of the best restaurants in the world. It's an incredible story, but what does it have to do with experiential marketing? Here's Guidara again.

Will Guidara: It was only then that I realized I wasn't actually in the business of serving people dinner. I was in the business of serving them memories.

Here's our point. In experiential marketing, as in hospitality, your primary responsibility is to make memories. Those memories turn into stories, and those stories change how a community thinks and feels about your schools, even if they didn't experience an experience firsthand. 

Let me give you a personal example. I went to a haunted house once, one of the OG experiential marketing events if you think about it, and I still remember it for a few reasons. Instead of entering a house, as I expected, or a school building, guests boarded a bus. We didn't know about the bus, and we didn't know where we were going. Not only that, the bus had been completely transformed. The windows were blacked out and the cabin lights were turned off, disorienting us. There were blood splatters on the wall, and the driver wore a deranged inmate costume. Large speakers actually vibrated the bus with ominous music. We were scared out of our minds before we reached the first stop. Because the haunted bus was so unexpected, engaged multiple senses, sight, sound, and touch, and was emotionally fraught, the memory of it was seared into my brain. 

While the hot dog evoked surprise and delight, the haunted bus evoked fear. The two experiences seemed so different, but they both involved intense emotions. The diners no doubt recommended Eleven Madison Park to all their friends, and I recommended the bus to all my friends. Now, a decade later, I'm telling you about it. 

That is experiential marketing at work. 

When your stakeholders have to make choices about your school district, whether to send their kids there or donate money to a fundraiser, It's their memories that will influence their decisions. A strong, positive memory of an in person experience could be the deciding factor. 

As we laid out in the summer issue of SchoolCEO Magazine about creating the experience of a lifetime, a successful experiential marketing campaign helps accomplish three main objectives, building brand awareness, fostering brand loyalty, and generating word-of-mouth. 

Building brand awareness. As we discussed in episode 2 of the podcast this season, your brand is what people expect of you. Do you deliver the goods or do you fall short? Are you one of the good guys? Do you have the customer's best interest at heart? If you want to attract students or staff to your schools, you need to make a good impression. Branded experiences, like open houses, for instance, are a great way to introduce your community to your schools and show them what your district stands for. If you can provide a positive experience that has your brand literally and figuratively written all over it, people will pay attention. 

Brand loyalty. What use is getting someone's attention if you can't keep it? We know that retention, whether of students or of staff, is crucial to the success of your schools. As author Zhecho Dobrev points out in his book, The Big Miss: How Organizations Overlook the Power of Emotions, consumers make decisions based on emotion rather than rational thinking. A strong emotional connection with your brand keeps families in your schools, even if the district across town has a shiny new campus. Building brand loyalty is one of the strongest reasons to invest in experiences. 

Word-of-mouth. Before print, virtually all marketing was word-of-mouth. And according to a 2021 study from Nielsen, 88% of people still trusted the recommendations of people they knew above all other forms of marketing. In other words, what you say about yourself matters much less than what others say about you. Positive word-of-mouth is critical to maintaining a strong district Beard, and branded experiences are a great way to get people talking.

Let's look at a real example of a positive branded experience that got people talking. After the pandemic, Sherese Nix, the then executive director of communications at Garland ISD in Texas, wanted to change up their yearly staff convocation event to give district employees a much needed morale boost. So instead of spending money on an outside speaker, Nix threw a party for them.

Sherese Nix: Garland ISD typically annually has what's called a convocation. That's a large gathering where everybody comes together typically to hear the superintendent's vision and the mission and set the charge for the year. You know, we had been in COVID. The teachers had worked hard. People had lost loved ones. This was gonna be our time as a family to come together for a big family reunion and what better way to do it than to, like, kick it off strong, completely different, have high energy, high momentum, and really show our staff that, hey, we are proud of you. We wanna support you. We wanna encourage you. We wanna set the tone for the year to be lit.

Let's stop here a moment. Nix hit the emotional nail on the head by surprising her staff with a celebration. You may have noticed a theme here already. Flash mobs, the haunted bus, and now Garland's convocation all included an element of surprise. Why? Because surprise heightens emotion. And this wasn't the same old convocation lecture either. It was a sensory experience.

Sherese Nix: It's important to be intentional even thinking through the through. For example, I mean, we brought in a live DJ who was mixing on the stage. We had we brought in lights. We brought in decor. We brought in all of the glow sticks. And when you walked in the building, you could see the teacher's eyes and mouths drop. They were not at all expecting, like, this big party celebration. Having our drum Eileen perform, having the step team perform, having our teachers be the speakers, the students be the speakers. And so that was really important as a goal. I felt like after 4 years, who can better tell our story than us? Who knows better what we've been through than us?

The event Nix created was such a hit, it generated word-of-mouth, which promoted the Garland ISD brand through a process Nix calls the ripple effect. Here she is again.

Sherese Nix: I wanted them to have a great experience. I wanted them to feel valued, loved, and appreciated. I wanted them to come in feeling charged and inspired because that's the ripple effect. If we get our teachers inspired and motivated and charged for the for the year, then guess what? That's gonna trickle on to our students, and then our students are gonna have a great experience in the classrooms, and then they're gonna go tell their parents, and then their parents are gonna tell their neighbors. Yeah. I mean, it blew up on social media. So I can't imagine how anyone didn't hear about it. We saw like PTA moms on on Facebook saying, wow, this is exciting. But even more so, what I loved is reading the messages from the teacher saying, this convocation has sparked fire in me for the school year. So if I'm a parent and I'm reading all of these messages that that, teachers are saying about them being ready and charged and fired up, As a parent, I'm like, heck yeah. Because they bring that energy then to my student, to the classroom, to that environment, creating more experiences throughout the district. And so I thought that was really powerful that even though they weren't invited, they still kind of felt it, through the messages that the teachers and the staff were posting. And, of course, parents are your biggest brand ambassadors. If your kid has a great experience, oh, girl, my school, they're amazing. The principal, you should come to our school or come to our district, like, you take ownership and pride in your school and in your district. So we realize if we create great experiences for our teachers, then it's that ripple effect that's gonna reach communities.

Let's take a closer look at why Nix’s event was so successful. The convocation party didn't just show her staff a good time, it showed them Garland ISD cared about them. According to author Dobrev, “when people feel that a brand cares about them as a person, respects them, listens to them, and is responsive to their needs, that creates emotional attachment. That's valid for personal relationships, it's valid in business relationships, and our research suggests that it's valid for school experiences as well,” Dobrev says. 

Now you know why creating memorable moments matters so much, let's talk about how you can create your own memorable school experiences, with next steps. 

Step One: Start small. 

Think about how you can improve existing events. Although you have fewer resources, K12 schools have one big advantage over the private sector when it comes to experiential marketing. You already engage with your audience face to face on a regular basis. Pep rallies and basketball games, parent teacher conferences and school plays, volunteer days and graduation ceremonies. These are all experiences you engineer for your community, and they're opportunities to grow that community too. Just like Garland ISD reimagined a tried and true, but tired way of doing convocations, your district has the opportunity to do the same thing with your events. You don't have to go to that length either, at least not to start. But do think about how you can make an existing event more engaging, more interactive, and more emotionally resonant. 

Moving on to Step Two: Know your audience. 

This might seem obvious, but it's worth emphasizing. In order to put on a successful experiential marketing event, you have to consider what your stakeholders want and need. If you're not sure, don't be afraid to ask them directly. Survey families and staff to determine unfulfilled needs. You'll gain invaluable insights, and they will feel their school or district listens to them and cares about them. 

And Step Three: Don't leave word-of-mouth up to chance. 

Branded experiences usually prompt participants to create social media content about the event. You should too. Adding a selfie station at your next event is an affordable and reliable way to encourage your guests to post about the experience. In fact, a study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that simply taking photos during an in person experience, like visiting a museum or eating at a nice restaurant, actually enhance the enjoyment of those experiences, all the more reason for you to encourage it. And as you're planning your next school dance, for example, why not create a prom hashtag? Doing so makes social media chatter about your event easier to track and encourages your audience members to interact with one another. 

Before we wrap up, we have to add a disclaimer. We know the responsibility of creating meaningful experiences often falls to leaders at the building level. In our recent study, A Seat at the Table, we surveyed 600 school communicators across the country about what they needed to be effective in their work. They reported having frequent access to their superintendents, but they were much more unsure about their relationships with principals. This finding echoes our previous study on principals, called Layers of Leadership. In districts where a communications professional was present, principals were mixed about how well they were able to work with them. Some lauded their comms teams for sharing the load, while other principals felt removed from them.

However, every single school has a brand that reflects on the larger district wide brand, which means the central office needs to do as much as it can to support building leaders as they level up their events. 

To recap, schools already host numerous experiential marketing events every year, from ball games to graduation. What you need to ask yourself is how you can improve those experiences for your guests in order to build your brand. Start small, know your audience, and encourage them to spread the word. Creating an interactive branded experience in a way that engages your audience's senses and shows them you care about them, just like Garland ISD showed its staff it cared, means your audience is more likely to hold on to the memory of that positive experience and continue to associate that positivity with your brand. Even my haunted bus ride made me feel cared for. Thinking about the time and effort the organizers, many of whom were volunteers, dedicated to creating such an incredible experience. 

And what even is a memory? Well, a memory is really a story We tell ourselves and others about our experiences. And everyone loves a good story. Think back to the Eleven Madison Park story. A robot didn't wheel out a hot dog and deposit it on the table, although that would have been memorable for a different reason. The table got personal attention from no less than the owner himself. The time he gave his customers showed how much he, and by extension, the Eleven Madison Park brand, cared. And because he was paying attention, Guidara heard their discussion and responded with a sprint down a crowded New York City street. As a result, those restaurant patrons felt seen and heard. And Guidara and his diners got one hell of a good story that they're still telling. You may not have the same budget as Fortune 500 companies. Then again, a hot dog delivered the right way can be much more meaningful than a $1,000 meal. Just remember, a successful event is just a memory in the making.

If you deliver a good memory, your school district won't just win a fan for life. You might win their friends and followers too. In the words of Doctor Seuss, “sometimes you will never know the value of a moment until it becomes a memory.” For many more stories, strategies, and real world examples of experiential marketing in action, visit schoolceo.com and read our summer issue of SchoolCEO Magazine, The Experience of a Lifetime.

The SchoolCEO podcast is brought to you by Apptegy. You can find a transcript for this episode and full issues of our magazine at SchoolCEO.com. If you like what you hear, subscribe to our newsletter and get bite sized tips on school marketing sent straight to your inbox. If you follow us on social media, we'll let you know when new episodes drop. Our magazine's most avid readers attend our annual SchoolCEO Conference. It's a great way to meet communications professionals and superintendents from across the country while exchanging ideas in a dedicated learning environment. Visit schoolceo.com/conference to see this year's lineup of keynote speakers and reserve your seat today. 

Season 3 of the SchoolCEO podcast is produced by Tyler Vawser, Britney Keil, Tanner Cox, and Ryan McDonald, with Eileen Beard as contributing editor. Thank you for listening.

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