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2023: The Power of Experience

22/03/2023
Experiential Marketing
London, UK
102
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The team at Imagination on why 2023 is the year of 'The Great Repositioning'

Businesses and brands have entered a turbulent economic time coupled with changing societal concerns. Three quarters of businesses plan to confront these changes by rethinking their brand this year.

This is ‘The Great Repositioning’.

Category evolution

The short-term effects of the recession and energy crisis, coupled with longer-term effects of technological, environmental and social change, serve to increase uncertainty for businesses.

But with this uncertainty comes opportunity.

The impact on businesses and brands is seismic, opening up new possibilities: new products, services, value propositions and business models. All are up for grabs.

Well-established category boundaries are breaking down as new, out-of-category entrants reset expectations. Think Netflix in the media industry, Amazon in IT services, or Shein in apparel and retail.

For established brands, long-held equity in a category can become a liability – a drag on their ability to protect or grow market share.

Carrying on as usual risks losing relevance, losing market share, and losing future growth.

We see this playing out in the plans of marketers and brand managers for 2023 – three quarters plan to reposition this year, according to our global survey of 375 senior marketers in the retail, luxury, consumer and enterprise technology industries.

The Great Repositioning

Repositioning a brand is a difficult game, particularly when there is a race from competitor brands to do the same thing. This is not a challenge of awareness, it’s a challenge of salience, relevance and credibility. And capacity.

A brand is a vision and a promise. Successful brand repositioning hinges on your customers’ understanding of your vision, and the degree to which they trust you to deliver on that promise.

For established brands, there can be a credibility gap between a well-established current vision and the promise of a new positioning. In closing that gap, traditional comms can only take you so far.

Our research and experience show that experiential marketing is one of the most effective ways to close the credibility gap - communicating a vision and establishing credibility by bringing customers closer to the brand and enabling them to experience a new capability for themselves rather than simply talking about it.

But as any marketer knows, budgets follow data, so a robust model for measuring and reporting the impact of experiential marketing on brand vectors is vital to support investment.

Brands have an experiential deficit

Our study finds that despite recognising the power of experiential marketing, a lack of confidence in their ability to measure and report on the effectiveness of experiential means that many marketers struggle to win the argument internally, leaving their marketing mix unbalanced and potential value untapped.

Our depth and reach model guides strategy development, creative ideation and ROI reporting to produce maximum impact and effectiveness, enabling marketing professionals to find the right mix of experiential within their marketing plans.

Uncertainty can be either a risk or an opportunity, but it’s worth using the most effective tools at your disposal to seize these emerging opportunities.

‘The Great Repositioning’ has begun, but who wins and who loses depends on their understanding of the true nature of the challenge.

Businesses are looking to brands to deal with market changes, societal changes and a looming recession.

Credits
Work from Imagination
Creating the North Star for growth
Global Consumer Goods Company
10/08/2023
6
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