Activating your brand means creating a connection between your company and its customers. It's about finding ways to bring your brand to life so that people can interact with it on a personal level.
There are many ways to do this, but in this post, we'll focus on 10 real examples of brand activation.
These should give you some ideas of how you can get started with activating your own brand. Let's dive in!
Read more: 30 Most Inspiring Brand Activation Ideas
What is Brand Activation?
Brand activation means providing a brand experience for customers to increase brand awareness and brand presence.
The interesting news about brand activation is that it could happen in any place to provide a surprising brand experience. From music events to beauty salons and even local restaurants use brand activation methods and provide special offers at least in their first stages of establishment.
Brand activation aims to provide a different, new brand experience for the target audience to make them brand ambassadors and representatives. Various companies use several practices to enhance brand presence in customers’ lives by offering a unique experience. Brand activation marks the difference between your business and the competitors.
Read more: A Simple Step-by-Step Guide for Brand Activation
Values of Brand Activation
- Creates and improves interaction with customers using various methods to increase their brand loyalty.
- Provides new and better ways to communicate with customers and stay connected to impact them emotionally. Research shows these types of interactions. Help customers choose your brand between so many suppliers.
- Increases brand awareness by providing a unique and remarkable brand experience.
- Used for rebranding purposes to introduce new features or services.
- Directly bring your marketing campaigns and giveaways to your target audience.
- Reduce marketing costs and expenses to a better known, workable interaction with customers.
- More effective, whether including other marketing and digital marketing campaign or adequately to individual customers at a local level.
10 Brand Activation Examples
Brand activation campaigns are a great field of experience for brand stylists and designers. Brand activation examples include new immersive interactive designs in pop-up stores and site-specific temporal or immanent experiences.
You will explore 10 cool brand activation examples by well-known international brands in the following.
1- Starbucks: Sparkle Shop
Starbucks Canada opened a sparkle pop-up store to introduce a new series of carbonated drinks in a clean and beautiful place. Many Toronto-based bloggers and influencers welcomed this new experience, took part in this pop-up store, and made these Starbucks beverages hot on social media. Starbucks Canada designers appropriated a great place to this new series of ice tea drinks and introduced them to followers and Starbucks customers. Starbucks offers several carbonated drinks using Sparkle's name, and that's the principal theme of the Sparkle pop-up shop.
2- Lipton Ice Tea: Be A Daybreaker
Another successful brand activation that also deals with tea and beverage belongs to Lipton Ice Tea, which, as you know, is available in 5 flavors. Lipton runs a brand activation for its ice tea giveaways before 8 in the morning with the hashtag #beadaybreaker. Lipton directly addresses its target audience with a surprising free ice tea on Friday morning with this experimental campaign. The idea of running a campaign at certain times of the day is so interesting and maybe useful for other brands across the world.
3- Dunkin' Donuts Giveaway RV
Dunkin' Donuts activated its iced beverages with a giveaway RV last summer. The brand activation campaign winners win a one-week RV rent experience to every place they desire with an RV full of delicious drinks and donuts. It was a successful brand activation as winners share enjoyable moments with other users and followers on social networks. Participants entered the program by filling out forms and sharing them using the #DunkinRefreshSweepstakes hashtag. With this brand activation and hashtag, Dunkin Donuts became trending on social media networks, and brand awareness increased pleasantly.
4- GoGo Squeez Applesauce
Using automated machines to bring the product to the consumer is a wonderful old way to attract children and adults. GoGo SqueeZ used a new sale machine that is large applesauce, and children take out normal applesauce products from it. Some winners also receive a year's supply of applesauce which is a great way to have loyal customers. GoGo SqueeZ Goodness Machine provides a different experience that children remember and enjoy. Giant machines are an amazing way to attract and surprise people, especially children, and kids and GoGo SqueeZ Goodness Machine is one of the most successful recent ones.
5- Zappos and Google: Pay with a Cupcake
Google worked on a campaign in Texas where people participated with the #paywithaphoto hashtag and received cupcakes as a reward. Zappos brand activation took advantage of this campaign and launched a new campaign with the #paywithacupcake hashtag, in which people handed their cupcakes to receive Zappos products.
Zappos brand awareness increased using this creative brand activation with cooperation with Google. Brands' cooperation in such campaigns increases their potential to attract customers emotionally and have more loyal customers. Cooperation does not necessarily require similar activities as Google activities are different from Zappos products, but they can also interact with each other to surprise customers.
6- HP Anti-Gravity Printer
HP released a new series of photo printers that work against gravity and could be used by astronauts in space and arranged a brand activation with zero gravity. This brand activation took place with influencers, reporters, and HP employees in a simulated low-gravity place. The HP design team provided a unique experience developing the story of a printer used in zero gravity conditions. People are excited to see a series of influencers working with a special printer in a zero-gravity place and will remember the product and brand when they need to buy a printer.
7- Adidas: Jump Store
Adidas is a global brand well-known for its sports shoes and clothes. The new basketball shoes of Adidas were released with a gamified program in which participants have 24 seconds to jump and pull the product from 10-meter high. Participants should try to earn the sports shoes with jumping, an enduring and amazing action that leads to gaining one of the best sports shoes available. This campaign was successful, and people enjoyed it with a Chicago Bulls player on social networks. Adidas designers used minimal elements to promote the brand values and new products.
8- Stella Artois Hotel Experience
Belgian beer brand Stella Artois designed another amazing brand activation experience. The winners of this brand activation received a hotel booking with everything desired for a memorable journey, including its products. This brand activation also featured interesting and surprising elements, like a call from actor Liev Schreiber and a virtual chat with Andy Cohen. Considering coronavirus spread, Stella Artois' brand activation uses the idea of travel in a safe, sanitized place.
9- Revolve around the world
Revolve is another global brand that runs experimental campaigns accompanying influencers and popular figures. In a novel experience, Revolve invited many influencers to a carnival in LA and started to travel around the world. Revolve carnival combines surprising elements with popular influencers to make a unique experience. This brand activation campaign became successful as it provided a different, amazing experience.
10- Sonic Shakes
Sonic is a milkshake brand with creative and engaging marketing campaigns. In their last experience, Sonic took advantage of Coachella, a music and arts festival in California, and distributed its milkshakes to users who used the #squareshakes hashtag on their social network profile. Festival-goers are the target audience of Sonic, and the brand used a popular situation to giveaway its new products and activated its new brand. Sonic #SquareShakes became viral and gained social networks users' attention.
Brand Activation with Peekage
Peekage is an innovative solution provider for brand activation that combines packaging and distribution of samples using artificial intelligence to choose the right customers and track various marketing plans.
New brands that need a base to find a customer network uses Peekage for their brand activation.
By sending the right products to the right customers, you can have a functional brand that works at some stage of its life. You can use Peekage as a digital product sampling platform to connect with the right customers and gather insights.
Contact us if you have any questions.
Brand Activation: A Unique Marketing Campaign That Gains Attention
The idea behind brand activation campaigns is that by making something new and exciting, you can grab your audience's attention. Brands typically use the newest items in these types of marketing activities to boost awareness for their brands among persons.
Brand activation should be fun and contain surprising and innovative elements to engage people effectively. Depending on the activity of the brand, several solutions are available to communicate with more customers and achieve the target audience.
Pop-up stores, giant machines, different scenarios, and providing a unique experience are the main features of brand activation campaigns by popular global brands.
Creativity has an important role in designing an amazing experience as designers seek creative, different ways to interact with customers.
Brand activation is not limited to site-specific or physical activities as several experiences are designed using virtual reality and AR technology. Some online solution providers also offer tailored brand activation services to find the target audience and deliver suitable products and samples to the right customers.
Key Takeaways
- Brand activation seeks to provide a unique experience that people desire.
- Creativity lies at the core of any successful brand-driven campaign.
- Brand activation can conduct on physical or digital platforms.
- Like other marketing campaigns, brand activation seeks to make hashtags or content viral.
- Brands use all accessible facilities to make sure the brand activation is cool and interesting.
- Online methods distribute individual samples to the target audience and require nothing but a creative plan.
