Experiential marketing is key to bringing your brand to life. By exploring dimensions that aren’t possible in standard packaging, you can truly display your brand’s ethos with experiential marketing and packaging.

This type of marketing is a popular marketing strategy that utilizes branded experiences and events to pull consumers into a brand. These experiences will essentially inspire your target audiences to share your brand with their peers online and through word of mouth. The goal is to engage your target audience in as many ways as possible.

This can be done in a variety of ways — from incorporating multiple senses into your packaging to putting together an immersive one-of-a-kind experiential product launch. Packaging essentially is an element of an overall experiential marketing campaign. By incorporating and emphasizing unique, experience-driven packaging in your experiential marketing campaign, you can truly take your campaign to the next level.

Here we’ll dive into what exactly brand ethos and experiential marketing are and give you inspiration on how you can bring this harmony of elements into your marketing and packaging experience:

What Is Brand Ethos?

Brand ethos is a term derived from the Greek word ethos. In the context of marketing, a brand’s ethos is a brand’s embodiment of personality, culture, mission, traits, and more. It’s the connection from your brand to your audience. A strong brand ethos enhances credibility and authenticity.

A brand ethos is essentially the overlying culture and character of your company. And brand ethos can be successfully highlighted through carefully planned experiential marketing and packaging strategies. Let’s dive into how exactly brands can achieve this ...

Bringing Brand Ethos to Life with Experiential Marketing

Your brand can be brought to the next level with experiential marketing. You’ll be able to connect with your ideal audience, convert them into loyal customers, truly stand out in a crowded marketplace, and even connect the product itself to the overarching campaign elements.

Before we start, in order to bring your brand’s ethos to life, you need to first have a confident definition of your brand. Think about what makes your brand tick. What personality traits does your culture hold? What values are core to your brand? Questions like these are essential when developing a successfully branded experiential marketing campaign.  

Put simply, experiential marketing with the help of packaging is a way of creating an experience through these means to, instead of abruptly inserting your product into a consumer’s life, interact with your target audience on a more human level. A successful campaign will make the consumer feel as though they are one with your brand identity. When a campaign successfully incorporates packaging into an experiential marketing campaign, the campaign becomes physically connected to the product. The packaging becomes an embodiment of the product itself, therefore, driving more value in the execution of a sale.  

Experiential marketing and packaging often utilize all five senses to immerse the consumer. Experiential packaging often emphasizes the opening experience — pulling the target in from the very beginning. Packaging will also not only immerse the consumer in the brand, but it will often be multi-functional with beautiful real-life elements incorporated into the design. Every aspect that goes into experiential marketing and packaging is to create the idea that the consumer is experiencing a unique experience.

It's all about your brand and promoting your brand value. Instead of focusing on specific products, as traditional marketing does, experiential marketing works to elevate your brand values and convey your brand ethos as a whole to your ideal audience. This process connects to consumers on a deeper level. They get to know not only your products but your brand from the inside out. This connection can further customer loyalty.

So now that we’ve discussed the unique relationship between experiential marketing and brand ethos, you’re probably wondering how exactly brands pull this off. Below are a few brand ethos experiential marketing and packaging campaigns that truly set the bar high:

Joy Razors Interactive Product Launch

Pop Sugar partnered with Joy Razor for their product launch. Joy Razor’s goal was to take the little wins women experience every day and create a fully immersive experiential marketing pop-up with the overall arching theme that Joy can help you achieve even more small wins

From nailing your makeup every morning to singing in the shower every small win should be celebrated. That’s why Joy and Pop Sugar created a space that celebrated these small moments. Guests were guided through the exhibit of photo ops, interactive elements, and more.

The event pulled in over 800+ visitors over a 2-day period making it an extremely successful event. As you can see, Joy’s brand ethos is to make women’s lives easier. In addition to this, Joy’s simple and colorful packaging connects to the overall idea of the campaign by emphasizing the simplicity of a small win. By making this colorful pop-up about celebrated small wins consumers can relate to the Joy Razor brand as a whole.

Veuve Clicquot Arrow Experiential Packaging & Pop-Up Event

Veuve Clicquot is a name known around the world. It’s one of the finest and oldest champagne brands on the planet. People from all over their world know the luxury this brand exhumes.

When it comes to their marketing, things are no different. Veuve Clicquot’s recent experiential packaging campaign was one for the books. As an ode to the spirit of adventure that is crucial to the ethos of Veuve, the new program “Clicquot Journey” released a line of collector’s packaging inspired by traditional road sings. The brand released a collection of 29 global destinations in a Clicquot Arrow metal case. Upon opening the sliding lid, one will find a 75cl bottle of Veuve Clicquot Yellow Label Brut.

The packaging also states how many kilometers the listed city is from Reims, the unofficial champagne capital of the world, so the consumer can find their way back to Clicquot no matter where they are in the world.

This experiential packaging is a way to connect consumers all over the world – creating a bond to the brand and literally pointing them back to the brand. On top of that, the Clicquot Arrow is meant as a collector’s item so consumers will keep and display the packaging for years to come. The packaging connects the adventurous spirit of Clicquot personally to consumers around the world through a simple arrow.

A recent Veuve Clicquot pop-up in the Frankfurt Germany airport was filled with “Instagrammable” moments. The pop-up was celebrating the brands latest limited-edition champagne. The 23 sq. meter pop-up was covered in the recognizable yellow and pink shades every Veuve drinker knows and loves.

Limited edition items such as ice jackets, pencil-shaped gift boxes (a homage to winemakers who used pencils to write notes for each Champagne blend range) and more were handed out to customers. The pop-up also incorporated educational features such as a champagne tasting and popcorn pairing experience.  

The pop-up store portrayed Veuve Clicquot’s brand ethos perfectly. From the tastings to the giveaways and more, this was a true success.

KIVA Confections at Outside Lands Festival

KIVA Confections is a well-known cannabis edible brand born out of the need for a consistent, potent, and enjoyable edible cannabis product. This year at Outside Lands Musical Festival, a festival that celebrates not only music but food, wine, and art, Kiva Confections presented a truly immersive experience.

Festival-goers approached the booth which had a classic bakery feel to it. The workers were dressed in white with black aprons and white 5-panel baseball caps. It brought a classic, traditional, and sophisticated feel to a brand that would not have been legal ten years ago. KIVA featured their wide array of products at this event in high-quality, artisanal packaging that perfectly aligns with their brand. All KIVA packaging emphasizes their value of education by featuring educational information that helps consumers understand exactly what the products is, safe consumption, and more about the KIVA brand. 

KIVA puts a large emphasis on quality, making it one of the most heavily weighted features in its brand identity. When a festival-goer approached this exhibit, quality was truly in the air. Consumers could truly feel that this product was trusted, reliable, and of the highest quality imaginable. 

KIVA is dedicated to redefining the cannabis confection industry as a reliable space. With their artisanal approach to cannabis edibles and informational packaging exhibited at this event, KIVA is helping consumers see that the cannabis edible industry does not hold the stigma it has in the past.

Experiential marketing and packaging are key to elevating the ethos of any brand. Consumers grab onto experiences and remember them for years to come. Take a bit of inspiration from these brands and try out these strategies in your next campaign!