Traditional Marketing

Traditional marketing comprises those advertisements and promotions typically associated with marketing. Billboards, flyers, and television commercials are all examples of traditional marketing. These methods are effective in getting your name and your mission to the public, but attaining a personal touch is difficult through traditional marketing.

Experiential Marketing

As the name suggests, experiential marketing focuses on the experiences and the emotions of the customer. Experiential marketing allows customers to take ownership of a product's marketing because they have an emotional investment in that product. Demonstrations and taste tests are common examples of experiential marketing; they draw customers to the product, give them a reason to remember the product and, hopefully, customers will give a good recommendation to their friends.

Traditional Vs Experiential Marketing

• Traditional marketing places its emphasis on the functional features and core benefits of products and services, while experiential marketing emphasizes the creation of stimulating brand experiences for the consumer. The mass advertising appeals of traditional marketing heavily points consumers towards a product’s raw features and its resulting benefits. Entire ad campaigns are built around this concept. Meanwhile, the experiential approach seeks to capture and sustain consumer interest by creating truly exciting and emotionally meaningful live brand experiences – thereby generating loyal brand champions and sparking word-of-mouth awareness.

• Traditional marketing views competition through the narrow lens of very specific product/service categories, while experiential marketing views competition by understanding that products/services fit within a broader consumption experience. Consider traditional marketing’s take on competition: to beat the competition, a new feature might be added onto a product – marginally enhancing a benefit. On the other hand, an experiential perspective yields this insight: to differentiate a brand from the competition, the entire consumption experience must be taken into consideration. And so when it comes to a brand’s product, we must ask: how do the advertisements for the product affect the consumer’s daily life? How does the product impact the consumer’s social relations and sense of belonging? These questions – and many more – arise when we don’t see a product as just a set of features and benefits, but as part of a broader life experience.

• Traditional marketing sees consumers as strictly rational, while experiential marketing sees consumers as both rational and emotional. The traditional marketing approach treats consumers as if their choices were always rational. Their decisions are seen as the result of purely logical steps – understanding they have a need, searching for more information, comparing various alternative options, and then making the buying decision. But experiential marketing adds a large emotional dimension to consumer behaviour – seeing them as driven by spontaneity, by fun, by fantasies, by deep feelings and imagination.