Experience the Message: How Experiential Marketing Is Changing the Brand World

by Max Lenderman

Experience the Message is an exciting guide to today's revolution in marketing that challenges long-held beliefs about how products are introduced and sustained on the consumer's highly cluttered radar screen. This book reveals how today's companies can use credible voices and sensory experiences to bring the brand -- its essence and its benefits -- to life, how a company stimulates interaction between the brand and consumers in meaningful locations, creating a positive and memorable association in places and at times where the consumer is most receptive to learning or interacting with a product or brand.

Genres: Business

336 pages, Paperback

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.