Scale-up series: What is a brand activation, and when should you do it?
A brand activation is a marketing strategy that aims to bring a brand to life and create a deeper connection with its target audience. It involves creating engaging experiences that allow consumers to interact with a brand in a memorable way and spread it with others they know.
The goal of brand activation is not only to build brand awareness, but drive engagement, create a positive and memorable experience, which ultimately increase sales. This can be achieved through a variety of tactics such as experiential marketing, product sampling, events (such as launch events, community events, etc), promotions, sponsorships, and social media campaigns.
Brand activation campaigns typically focus on creating an emotional connection with consumers, rather than simply pushing a product or service – think more invitational marketing than persuasion marketing. By creating experiences that are fun, unique, and remarkable, brands can establish a positive association in the minds of their target audience.
When should you conduct a brand activation?
You can carry out a brand activation at different intervals, when it first becomes accessible and you want to drive traffic to it, when you need to re-energise or reinvigorate it (perhaps after a pivot), or when you’ve substantially changed your offering and need to get new messages out to an existing audience.
This may seem like an obvious question when we ask, but many clients aren’t able to communicate what their brand’s personality is.
This is important because without being able to describe the space where your brand fits in, you’ll waste time in hunting around unnecessarily to find it when you could be reinforcing and defending it. Even if you can’t define the exact street, you should know the neighbourhood or city (see our article on how this metaphor works).