Experience the Message

by Max Lenderman

Consumers -- exposed to roughly four thousand marketing messages a day -- are no longer willing to be part of a passive consumer base, subject to conventional advertising and marketing. Rather, they are joining a growing tribe of brand atheists who don't want to be targeted by impersonal messages. They want dialogue, which marketers give to them through experiences with brands that are personally relevant, memorable, and meaningful. This is the context for Max Lenderman's experiential marketing (XM) revolution. Lenderman explains who the new cutting-edge marketers are, how they think and operate, and why they matter in today's shifting brand world. He reveals how companies can interact with consumers in meaningful ways and what consumers should expect from companies that want their attention and loyalty. Max has led successful experiential campaigns for Fortune 500 companies and smaller businesses. Here, he unveils groundbreaking case studies and discusses the latest trends in experiential marketing-buzz, sub-viral marketing, roach marketing, text marketing, flash mobs, pop-up retail, advergaming, retailainment, and causal marketing. Experience the Message gives its readers--consumers and marketers the essential knowledge they need to charge to the front of the global marketing movement.

Genres: Business

336 pages, Kindle Edition

First published December 7, 2006

Reviews

[Ian · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you accept Lenderman's basic premises, that mass market advertising is dead (or at least, dying) and companies who try to maintain a 'command-and-control' hold on their brands via traditional one-to-many mass marketing rather than accept that consumers (or rather 'prosumers') are now stakeholders in the brand conversation and want to be engaged in that conversation one-one-one, this is an interesting read.

While I question some of his assumptions (e.g. that consumers hate most marketing directed at them except, surprise, the experiential style marketing that he makes his living peddling), some of his assertions have since writing the book have come true. When he published the book in late 2005, things like blogs, RSS, mobile marketing, Flash mobs and TiVo were still relatively new and wonderful things and Facebook and YouTube were just barely in existence. Lenderman was pretty spot on about the rise of the social economy and how important social media and web 2.0 would become in marketing though.

Which begs the question: why he hasn't considered updating his book? I'd be curious to see how he'd reevaluate some of things he wrote about and see his take on how platforms like twitter, Facebook, foursquare and yelp etc. fit within his philosophy that how consumers experience a brand trumps how they perceive it via traditional advertising.