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Experiential Marketing: How
to Get Customers to Sense, Feel, Think, Act, and Relate to Your
Company and Brands
By Bernd H. Schmitt, Co-author of Marketing Aesthetics
New York: The Free Press, 1999, 253 pp.
Reviewed by Karl Speak
Sense, feel, think, act, and relate—now that's the way to
make a real impact with consumers. Following the success of his
earlier co-authored book Marketing Aesthetics, Bernd Schmitt
offers up these 5 tenets as sure-fire ways to build a distinctive,
valuable relationship with consumers. The author lays out a challenge
to marketers to move beyond the traditional "feature &
benefit" marketing approach to wooing consumers. Schmitt prompts
us to add emotion to our marketing mix. I endorse this notion. The
most admired brand relationships have a strong emotional tie that
forms the core of the lasting loyalty between consumers and the
brand. Brand loyalty provides the marketer with the luxury to attain
desired business results without depending solely on product attributes.
The author is energetic in his approach to convince the reader
that world class marketing has moved up a notch. The mandate in
today's fast paced, global economy is to create a customer experience
that is rich and diverse in the way the organization interacts with
the consumer. In Schmitt's first two chapters he builds the case
for the requirement of experiential marketing. Following a chapter
that introduces his framework for experiential marketing, the author
details his approach to brand marketing that emphasizes sensing,
feeling, thinking, acting, and relating as platforms to inject emotion
to the customer experience. Beyond introducing the core concepts
of experiential marketing, Schmitt uses the remainder of the 253
pages to describe sophisticated applications of his brand marketing
model. Readers will undoubtedly be familiar with the ample anecdotes
and case studies Schmitt uses to support his thesis. The use of
these real world references will provide the readers with a set
of benchmarks to evaluate their acceptance of the concepts set forth
by this well traveled consultant and professor at Columbia University.
Although the author uses many well known case studies I did find
myself forced to take a leap in certain cases to find validation
in some of his key concepts.
Who should read this book? Marketers willing to entertain a new
approach to marketing that may stretch their classical training
in brand management. In a world where so much of our conventional
wisdom about business seems to be up for grabs, marketers of all
experience levels should take a shot at entertaining Professor Schmitt's
new approach to brand marketing. Who knows—this new way to
sense, feel, think, act and relate to consumers may just be the
type of marketing-thinking we need to experience!
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