Evolving Brand Consumers into Advocates
- “The breakfast of champions.”
- “You are now free to move about the country.”
- “Made from the best stuff on Earth.”
Each year, brands around the world spend billions of dollars together crafting catchy and memorable taglines and jingles to achieve two primary goals:
- Convince you that their product or service is better than the competitions’.
- Appeal to your aspirational, better self; that you can achieve who you really want to be using what they’re selling.
A century ago, these strategies simply aimed to entertain and entice potential customers to become buyers, and make the sale. However, as time’s gone by, marketers are far savvier, trying to lead consumers to identify personally with their products and services, to create relationships. Do any of these ring a bell? (Have it your way | What’s in your wallet? | Shouldn’t your baby be a Gerber baby?)
These statements actually aim to have consumers define themselves by what products and services they buy (like your mother used to tell you, “You are what you eat”). And many companies take it a step further, and up front tell you that they want a relationship with you forever!
- Love it for life. | Volo
- A diamond is forever. | Debeers
- Amazing yogurt, amazing life. | Dannon Yogurt
But there’s a way far more effective, immersive, and memorable way to create that emotional bond with your target audience than a catchy tagline or this year’s AM radio jingle.
Evolving your products and services into destinations.
PGAV Destinations partnered with H2R Market Research and conducted a nationwide study of destination guests regarding their perceptions of attractions which celebrated and promoted a specific brand’s product or service. The findings were thrilling, enlightening, and greatly encouraging. One thing is absolutely certain:
Consumers who visit brand destinations are 42% more likely to use that brand’s products and services, as opposed to competitors’ products that can only be found on shelves.
Is your brand a destination yet?
From Pint to Place
How many ways can we experience Anheuser-Busch destinations?
We have over 200 brand destinations across the country, with most of those being embedded experiences in locations like airports and stadiums. We’ve been proud supporters of the NFL, NHL, and MLB for years, and we find it a great opportunity to bring our portfolio of delicious brands to the fans at those exciting events. We’ve got great brewery experiences internationally too in Canada, Brazil, and Belgium.
How did you grow from offering pints to offering places?
Almost immediately after we started brewing beer in St. Louis, we opened our doors to the community in the late 1800s to come into our brewery to tour and taste our beers. Our motto has always been “making friends is our business,” and what better way to accomplish that by opening up your doors to provide hospitality to anyone and everyone who wants to visit? To this very day, we invite people to come to the brewery where beer and friends are made.
How has that philosophy evolved?
We expand that spirit of making friends and celebrating beers throughout every brand destination we create. We operate hundreds of mobile experiences (like our world-renown Clydesdales) across the states state fairs, hometown parades, or sold-out concerts. Our mobile Beer School has been touring the nation since the ‘90s, and this will be the fourth year of our partnership with Jay Z to bring Philadelphia the Made in America Tour. Even our brewery experience has evolved: welcoming hundreds of thousands of guests each year has forced us to grow with hundreds of beer ambassadors and five different beer attractions at our St. Louis site, such as Beer School or our new Biergarten (which was just rated the #1 biergarten in St. Louis).
How has extending your brands into destinations helped Anheuser-Busch?
In the last two years since we’ve added so many new experiences to the St. Louis brewery, we’ve doubled our visitation on site. That means we’re not only attracting new guests and brand enthusiasts, but we’re seeing a massive increase in repeat visitation. We conduct daily entry and exit surveys, and visitors always leave with a stronger brand connection and a greater likelihood to purchase after visiting. We’re able to pair these guest insights along with our lessons from a wide range of brands and brand destinations – national tour centers, embedded experiences, mobile events – and continue to perfect new experiences and evolve our cornerstones to create the best places to celebrate friends and beer.
What is a Brand Destination?
We define a brand destination as a physical place dedicated to celebrate, learn about, and enjoy a specific brand or a company’s portfolio of products and services. This by no means leaves out traditional destinations: zoos and aquariums teach about the natural world; theme parks celebrate thrills and fun; resorts and hotels offer comfort and respite; while museums and cultural sites educate about our past and forecast our future.
However, brand destinations are physical places driving passion about products or services that traditionally don’t have an outside-of-the-store home, like soda, cereal, or shampoo. Our research uncovered four very unique types of brand destinations, each with their own strengths, familiarity, and attributes.
Brand Experiential Attractions (BAE)
These destinations are large, permanent attractions celebrating a particular company, its products, and its people. Some of the most popular BAEs include Anheuser-Busch Brewery Tours, The World of Coke, and the Sony Wonder Technology Lab.
BAEs are the most popular kind of brand destination, with more than 65% of survey respondents having recently visited one.
Embedded Experiences (EE)
Embedded Experiences are brand destinations found within larger destinations, usually the main draw for attendance such as airports and stadiums. Some of the most popular EEs include Starbucks kiosks inside malls and grocery stores, Nickelodeon Universe inside the Mall of America, and the National Geographic Visitor Center at the Grand Canyon.
EEs are the third most popular type of brand destination, with 52% of respondents having recently visited one.
Brand Experiential Retailers (BER)
These destinations manifest as stand-alone retail stores, which embody the brand and emphasize brand attributes. Some of the most popular BERs include Disney Stores, Apple Stores, and American Girl® Places.
BERs are the second most popular type of brand destination, with 62% of respondents having recently visited one.
Temporary Exhibits (TE)
These brand experiences are ephemeral, immersing consumers in the brand for a mere afternoon or a weekend, and then disappearing typically for another year or to another continent. Some of the most popular TEs include Harley Davidson Group Rides, Victoria’s Secret fashion shows, and music festivals.
TEs appear to be the most common brand destination, including everything from wine tastings to event sponsorships, and are often the most effective brand destination.
The Bottom Line at the Top
Despite the variety of brand destinations being relatively limited across the country (as opposed to traditional destinations), the market is already immense. More than three quarters of our respondents had recently visited at least one of the brand destinations listed in the study, representative of nearly 93 million US households. Even when we removed the most popular and pervasive brands, such as Apple, Disney, and Starbucks, still 51% of our respondents had recently visited at least one of the remaining brand destinations.
This signifies a very important and interesting cultural shift. Just as companies and marketers are trying to engage their target audiences on a deeper level, audiences are actively seeking out that deeper brand engagement as well. Just as our Meet the Millennials study revealed, today’s consumers want to nurture more intimate relationships with their favorite brands. And brand destinations undoubtedly grow those relationships.
According to our study, consumers are 42% more likely to use the products and services promoted within a brand destination after visiting it. In addition, more than seven out of 10 brand destination visitors are likely to recommend those brands after visiting a dedicated brand destination. TV spots, radio jingles, billboards, print ads, and even spontaneous guerrilla marketing can’t even begin to touch advocacy conversion numbers in that league!
In addition, positive opinions about brands were higher among those consumers who had visited an associated brand destination, as opposed to those who hadn’t, across all four destination categories. Positive opinion was 12% higher for Brand Experiential Attractions, 18% higher for Embedded Experiences, 21% higher for Brand Experiential Retailers, and a whopping 30% higher for Temporary Exhibits.
When we asked respondents to rate how they felt after their most recent brand destination experience, overall their connections to and endorsements of the brand had greatly increased.
Brand Destinations provide an outstanding platform for identifying, reaching and engaging one’s brand advocates, and evolving target customers still on the path
to purchase.
If you’re seeking to grow your market and deepen your customers’ love and passion of your brand(s), it might be time to put down the billboards and magazines, and pick up the brick and mortar.
Why Visit a Brand Destination?
How do you begin to identify your biggest fans?
If you’re Groupon or Amazon, you encourage your customers to share their purchase on social media with friends, tracking that ever-desired higher net promoter score. You might encourage your customers to join your mailing list, tracking their click-throughs, while other services like Dollar Shave Club and Trunk Club offer customer opinions back to retailers. But a dedicated brand destination provides a daily bellwether for your strongest brand advocates. According to our study, brand destination visitors are 38% more likely to already be using the product or service that the destination promotes, as opposed to non-visitors. That means that a sizable portion of these guests are already advocates, and an even larger portion are already interested enough in the brand to visit the destination – and may be easier to convert to repeat buyers/users than non-visitors.
When given 16 different options of why guests chose to visit a brand destination, across all four types, the same two answers rose to the very top:
- “Have a fun experience”
- “Enjoy the brand in a new way”
How many brand managers yearn for their customers to associate those two attributes with their brand?
To have their target audience associate “fun” with their product, or pine to experience their brand in a new way? For some, and possibly most, it’s a dream come true.
But really, how powerful are these brand destinations? We asked our respondents to rate various visitation motivations on a Likert Scale (strongly disagree to strongly agree), and 64% of our respondents said that they visited a region specifically to attend a particular brand destination. It wasn’t an ancillary part of their itinerary, and it wasn’t that they had some free afternoon time and filled it with a brand destination: they went to that city or town with the primary intent to visit that brand destination.
52% of respondents noted that they visited to learn more about the brand itself, while 50% said they went because they had a “brand enthusiast” in their family or party. How many of your customers go out of their way to learn more about your brand, and bring their friends and family along with them? Talk about infectious marketing.
What Matters to Them
So you want to open or improve your brand destination?
That’s fantastic news! And we can certainly help you get started, because respondents were very vocal about their priorities and pain points during their most recent brand destination visit.
Brand destination visitors, no matter the type of brand destination or depth of passion for the brand, unanimously agreed that out of ten options, four key things are essential to make a great brand destination experience:
- Friendly employees or volunteers
- A unique experience that was out of the ordinary in some way
- A diverse experience with a lot of different things to see and do
- Something that is both fun and educational at the same time
So if you’re just the world’s largest ball of twine with grumpy employees and nothing to teach, you’ve got some great growth opportunities.
We gave our survey respondents 16 different attributes that are common at destinations of all kinds around the world, and asked them to rate them on a five point scale of how important they are when considering their next brand destination visit. Five offerings consistently topped their lists:
- Quality food
- Interactive exhibits and activities
- Live demonstrations
- Guided tours
- Special events
In summary, feed your guests well and interact with them in a variety of ways, and they’ll love you.
But you can’t be like Ronco and just “set it and forget it.” While very few respondents said that they wouldn’t soon return to their most recent brand destination, those that did almost all agreed that they had “been there, done that.” They went on to note that if there was something new and fresh to see or do at the brand destination, they’d be far more likely to buy another ticket and visit again. While re-imagining and innovating might be simpler with the year lead-time of temporary exhibits, this presents a unique challenge for the most popular brand destinations – Brand Experiential Attractions – which require renovations, expansions, and changing exhibits to bring guests back for another round.
