Alice Sheng discussed the best practice of participation branding for a reference of your brand establishment. While it might be hard to understand the terminology of Participation Branding, it is quite easy to build our awareness with case studies. Check and feel free to discuss with us the best brand idea and marketing platform for your business.
What is Participation Branding
Participation branding indicates the marketing strategy to attract customers to engage in a brand experience to leave a memorable impression. Thus, the term “participation marketing” is also perceived as “engagement marketing” and “experiential marketing.”
Four Essential Attributes of Participation Branding
Existing examples demonstrated how participation branding works by introducing essential attributes like:
- Client’s involvement in the product’s personalization
- Emotional attachment by firsthand experience
- Campaign related to a trend or an atmosphere
- Integrating philosophy to highlight lifestyle or life attitudes
Product Customization
The product and service can be customized to accommodate specific individuals to increase customer satisfaction and make them feel more connected to the brand.
The seller will not persuade the customer to buy a product designed and manufactured. Instead, they are encouraged to get involved in part of the product creation. The typical example is to invite your client to add a touch of custom-made design or idea to an existing prototype like Nike’s “Nike By You.” You can let your imagination run wild and personalize Nike shoes on the prototype shoe with unique colors that you desire. This kind of method is useful to integrate market research with new product creation. You can gain a competitive advantage over competitors by figuring out your customer’s preferences.
You may also encourage them to celebrate their holiday differently, just like how Levis inspired its customers to create a meaningful message to express their feelings or care for their loved ones with a personalized Christmas gift.
Brilliant Ideas of Participation Branding–Product Customization:
Event Involvement
The event is especially favored by industry with a professional audience. According to the statistics released by UFI(The Global Association of the Exhibition Industry), over 4.5 million companies exhibit their products or services at events each year. The game creates the marketplaces for industries that the company in the same industry chain can gather together to voice themselves by building a stand with products displayed to impress the visitors. While not all exhibitors in an event can achieve fruitful results, the event planner has to be well prepared for activities on its booth within the short period of exhibition days.
You can also make your brand visible by organizing events on the street and shooting priceless moments into a video to raise awareness for your brand.
Online Interaction
The “brand” can come up with activities to invite people to participate, with a typical form of hashtag keywords commonly used in this era. As in, the awareness/trend is spread faster in the way of “#challenge,” “#contest,” or “#Campaign.”
The increasing popularity of social media, more companies like this kind of brand marketing, typical examples can be found in Burberry’s trench coats campaign back in 2009, Starbucks’s White Cup Challenge, and the Ice Bucket Challenge launched by the ALS Association in 2014.
The key to online interactive activity includes inviting celebrities to show their engagement, creating an action to trigger people’s interest, and shortlisting best performance to inspire others.
The company can either actively create a campaign or follow popular ones. The platform, like “TikTok,” has activities updated regularly for users. Thus, it would be best if you had some tricks to make the brand stand out. The idea is to synergy participation branding with content marketing. So, people remember your brand when they’re participating in those activities.
Life Philosophy
The brand is the same as a human being. It embodies the company’s culture and expresses itself by translating what the organization believes in its philosophy to inspire people. There are moral metrics universally agreed by people. Sometimes we need to deliver messages that people are seeking. Your products not only carries its natural property, or to share a piece of information. Thus, it becomes a symbol of motivation and inspiration if the philosophy is incorporated correctly.
In 2020, the widespread COVID-19 deprived millions of lives. People have to stay at home worrying about their security and even the fate of the nation. Now, it’s a great indication to all industries to ensure people remain connected virtually and spiritually in their businesses.
The most recent “One world: Together at Home,” witnessed by global citizens, is undoubtedly a great success to deliver the philosophy of “stay at home and enjoy life” at this crucial time. Once again, Nike doesn’t disappoint the audience by creating ”play for the world” to motivate and engage people to stay home and do workout during this work from home (WFH) period.