Branding Gets Experiential
Interactive marketing can be challenging because if you’re an international company, you don’t always see every consumer transaction. Event-based marketing, however, provides a way for consumers to experience the brand in person and possibly make a connection with a company, while the company has the chance to build its brand personality.
At Brown-Forman Beverages, which distributes a variety of beverages like Fetzer wines and Jack Daniel’s Whiskey, it's known that the brands are more important than the Brown family.
Paul Dolegowski, vice president of the Global Marketing Group at Brown-Forman, spoke about his company’s experiential branding devices at the recent DMA show in San Francisco. He said that because his company’s brands span the globe, it needed to find new ways to collect data from consumers and wanted to do it where they interact with the brands.
To achieve that, Brown-Forman started leveraging NASCAR events where the company erects a Jack Daniel’s tent in which consumers can register to receive a Jack Daniel’s email newsletter and take home branded merchandise. The tent has attracted 125,000 consumers since the road show started a year and a half ago. Brown-Forman actively collects consumer information while they visit the tent and in turn uses it for email and traditional marketing campaigns, as well as the newsletter. Dolegowski attributes the 30 percent growth in the consumer database across all the brands partly to the Jack Daniel’s tents.
At a recent event, Brown-Forman sent out invitation-only email notification to its database of Jack Daniel’s consumers, inviting them to attend a Jack Daniel’s bottle signing of master distiller Jimmy Bedford. Bedford was scheduled to sign bottles for about three hours. Instead, he spent the entire day there and depleted the cases of liquor. Now Brown-Forman wants to place Bedford on a worldwide tour.
Dolegowski says this experiential concept is working to “drive them up the loyalty ladder.” We agree.
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