A Brand Experience Case Study: Gore-Tex demonstrate that technical clothes can look stylish

After the success of the PR launch MotivAction delivered for the Gore-Tex ® SURROUND™ Product Technology launch in January they asked us to deliver a new brand experience live event that would showcase garments featuring their Gore-Tex fabrics and treatments.

Gore-Tex has been providing waterproof and breathable membranes and finishes to clothes manufacturers such as Berghaus and North Face for many years. However, many fashion consumers don’t realise the range of cutting-edge fashion brands that feature Gore-Tex or just how ‘on-trend’ some of the styles are. Gore-Tex asked us to showcase some of these garments to fashion journalists, particularly the Japanese influenced brands, such as Bathing Ape, nanamica and Visvim, who have developed a series of very stylish clothes.

MotivAction took over the Future Gallery, a fantastic white studio space in London’s Covent Garden and produced a colourful and vibrant, modern Japanese-inspired fashion show. We created bespoke mannequins from brightly coloured Perspex which were used to showcase some of the key garments. On the walls we hung giant coloured frames at jaunty angles within which we hung branded shoes.

The focus of the day was two high impact fashion shows in the style of a photo shoot. Shot on a bright blue background, our stylish models paraded in front of the photographer and his shots were instantly projected onto the walls around the journalists.

The event created a real buzz with journalists exclaiming how much they enjoyed the brand experience and the opportunity to get close to the garments. In fact, by the following morning many bloggers (such as Hypebeast, the most read online fashion news and information outlet) and journalists had written about the clothes they had seen.

Posted by Andy Cording, Brand Experiences Account Manager

Interactive game proves a hit for telecoms brand experience

Queues of people formed up and down the country as people waited to take part in a game of batak for T-Mobile’s latest experiential campaign.

Reactions were tested to the limit as people competed to attempt to hit the most lights out in 60 seconds, with the top scorer at each location winning a Blackberry handset.

The brand experience game was not only fun but created an excellent visual using clever branding and design to turn the game into a phone. Most importantly, while people queued there was a great opportunity for event staff to talk to potential customers about their latest proposition and boost those sales!

Posted by Debora King, Project Manager, The MotivAction Group

‘Tis the season to get ‘fest’-ive for brands

It comes around just once a year and there are absolutely no snow covered scenes or cherubic choristers in sight. That’s right, the summer festival music season is fast approaching. And it’s not just the world’s music fans that are gearing up to see their favourite bands. The world’s biggest brands pay good money to attend the summer festivals because they know that when music fans aren’t moshing or doing air guitar, they have a captive audience that will interact with their brand.

These days brands wishing to do their brand experience activity have so many festivals other than Glastonbury to choose from. Festival organisers have realised that festival-goers that used to enjoy them in their youth would still like to attend even though they now have children. Harvest at Jimmy’s Farm and Latitude are two great examples and many brands that target this audience benefit by creating standout brand experiences that entertain and engage them.

And don’t think that festivals are strictly the domain of trendy twenty-somethings. There are festivals aimed solely at the toddler market. Lollibop in Regents Park is a summer festival for kids under the age of 10 and features appearances Rastamouse and Peppa Pig. They even have Ministry of Sound put on a mini disco for them! Again, the brand experience or live experiential opportunities are endless.

Throw in some MotivAction brand ambassadors that are trained to engage and talk with enthusiasm and knowledge about your product and you’ll find it’s a winning combination.

So, if you want your brand adored and loved by a captive audience at this year’s summer festivals then you’ve still got time book some space. Give us a call, we’ll be happy to help.

In Brand Experiences we Trust

Every Monday a chap called Roy H. Williams (otherwise known as the Wizard of Ads) drops an email into my inbox. The week before last his newsletter informed us readers how customers aren’t gullible anymore – they can sense when you’re trying to sell to them. They aren’t interested in ‘positive thinking’ and gloss anymore; they’re all about action and doing. “Don’t tell us, show us!”, he continued. How true this is, given that these days household budgets are squeezed and every purchase is thought about long and hard.

Every year we hold a meeting with our Brand Experience Event Managers. It’s an opportunity for them to share their stories and experiences from the past year as they’ve toured the country doing store launches and promotional activity for our clients. We give them all manner of activities to do, from hosting product launches for our many and varied clients to a range of different promotional activities we manage for clients like T Mobile. The one thing that really stuck with me after this meeting was how they kept talking about how the activities we dream up for them to run encourages shoppers to queue and wait to take part in the activity. This, they tell us, gives them a chance to stand chatting to the shoppers, earning their trust, telling them about the brand and showing them the latest handsets and gadgetry. The shoppers soon forget about the potential prize they might be able to win on the wheel of fortune and, with the help of our brand ambassadors, ask to be ushered into the nearby store to purchase the product. How about that for delivering results?

It’s always been the case that brands require a solid marketing mix in order to get the best cut through for their products but with the right idea and the right people it really is possible for brands to genuinely gain the trust of their customers.

You are spoiling us (Brand) Ambassadors!

In the run up to the New Year the whole team at MotivAction have been working their socks off to win some fantastic new brand experience projects for some of the world’s best-known brands. In addition, Dave Turner our Operations Manager has been busy visiting universities and holding recruitment days to recruit the next wave of brand ambassador talent. I thought I’d catch up with him to find out what he and the team look for in great brand ambassadors.

What’s the most important quality you look for in a brand ambassador?

Being a brand ambassador isn’t an easy job. Imagine standing in a busy shopping centre and trying to encourage passers-by to stop and be engaged in the client’s brand or offer. You don’t have time to be a sales person, you only have time to be their best friend. So, what do we look for? Mostly natural charm and charisma.

What is the selection process like?

It’s actually quite tough. We only have a few hours with these guys so our interview techniques have to quickly identify those that are going to be great at the job. We carefully outline the nature of the job to each of the interviewees and we then give them the opportunity to leave half way through if they don’t think they are going to be able to do it.

You spend quite a lot of time on the road searching for brand ambassadors, what are the benefits to our clients?

It’s really important that our clients’ brands are represented properly so we work hard to find brand ambassadors that we know, that work well in a team and that will deliver 100% of the time. Then we can match specific brand ambassadors that will work best for a specific client.

If you’re interested in becoming one of MotivAction’s Brand Ambassadors visit fill in our recruitment form or drop us a line with a little information about yourself to crew@motivaction.co.uk.