Success factors in experiential marketing campaigns for an international brand

This study is taking a look into the success factors in experiential marketing. Since the popularity of marketing actions that count into experiential has been increasingly used by world famous multinationals, such as Coca Cola and Red Bull, the interest towards the success factors of these kinds of marketing actions is growing. The intention is to find out how experiential marketing can give benefits for international brands. The goal is to define those variables that are impacting experiential marketing to meet the objectives that are set for the campaigns. This thesis is exploring the topic by first studying literature and presenting previous findings together with examples from some multinationals, and second, by interviewing experiential marketing professionals in order to build a deeper understanding of the success factors in some case campaigns. Experiential marketing has gained increasingly growing attention since the millennium, and there are two major factors that need to be taken into account in the experiential success of international brands. Those factors are the expanding access to new worldwide media and the country specific consumer values in today’s international market environment. Three case campaigns were explored in this thesis. This was done through interviewing professionals who had been part of doing an experiential campaign for an international brand, and through viewing the published materials from the case campaigns. The interviewees were chosen from advertising agencies that were working with international brands. The selection criteria included professional experience from experiential marketing. Interviews were conducted in a qualitative way. The type of the interview was semi-structured. The findings suggest that despite that all of the three experiential projects had been done for a different type of a product, and targeting different kind of consumers, the found success factors, however, had a lot of similarities. The last chapters are going to discuss the empirical findings together with the theoretical findings.