Overview

Brand activations give brands the capacity to deliver experiential associations alongside the more traditional two-dimensional associations that can be created with above the line marketing.

History shows these have the potential to be powerful tools in an alcohol brand marketer’s armoury. Our client wanted to connect its whisky with a new audience through a branded pop-up at a trendy London venue, introducing an innovative serve to shift perceptions of how premium whisky can be enjoyed.

Our task was to provide insights to enable them to optimise an experience that is primarily impacting a consumer’s unconscious mind.

Our Approach

Our team used observation and tactical interception interviewing to explore the impact of a whisky brand activation. Observation revealed how consumers interacted with the experience the brand had created and, where we encountered any ambiguity, carefully managed interactions with other attendees helped clarify how the experience was being processed.

We say ‘carefully manged interactions’ because we are mindful that questions are perilously problematic. Any question creates a psychological prime, most introduce a framing bias, and focalism bias is almost impossible to avoid. Using natural interactions we avoid these biases (and the problems of inviting misleading post-rationalisations) to build a behaviourally informed picture of how an activation is performing and why.

Output

We were able to demonstrate how the experience had the potential to connect the brand to a new audience and the power that the venue had to deliver the desired target audience. However, we also identified elements that were missing the mark by failing to adequately connect key parts of the event to the brand. Our work was able to identify where consumer attention was directed and what was influencing the drinks chosen, so that our client’s messaging could be better tailored to the behaviour of people attending the venue.

One key part of the experience was falling short because it demanded too great a behaviour change. We were able to use our knowledge of consumer psychology to recommend ways to make the desired shift significantly more likely (by leveraging attention, social proof and framing effects).