Consumer Engagement Marketing | Brands & Their Multiple Constituencies
Consumer engagement marketing is a high-value construct and mechanism that is starting to be bandied about more and more in the brand sphere, yet it’s far from a mainstream term or activation lever. Conceptually, it’s a conscious action-oriented effort whereby brands interface and interact with their target for a rich, meaningful two-way experience.
What is consumer or customer engagement marketing?
Consumer engagement marketing essentially defines itself. It’s when a brand comes together with their constituency in a meaningful way that emotionally resonates, is sticky, generates awareness that accelerates adoption, action, affinity, recommendation and repeat and ongoing purchase.
Consumer engagement facilitates the building and fostering of a genuine relationship between an individual and the brand.
Cue blind spot.
> People and brands tend to get caught up on the consumer part. Automatically people’s minds often go to this marketing tactic and solution as right for consumer brands and even often drill their assumption down further — that it’s the perfect fit for a CPG brand. That is correct. It’s also incredibly limiting.
Cue a-ha moment.
> E.v.e.r.y.b.o.d.y. is a consumer.
Cue mindset shift.
> A consumer engagement marketing strategy is effective for every brand.
Just like everyone is a brand ambassador, everyone is a consumer, too.
Why consumer and client engagement matter
Consumer engagement matters because in this type of approach, you’re going directly to the source in a genuine way. The brand comes to life in the authentic way it was intended via a personal introduction to the qualified target.
1. Initiate and shape the conversation.
The minute a brand is birthed, it no longer solely belongs to the creators. Everyone who comes in contact with it owns a piece. Often the people closest to it are those that support it: workforce, janitorial service, delivery person. Taking this into consideration, brands would be wise to actively create experiences that hook and engage all varieties of consumers, capitalizing on the opportunity to build direct connections with the valuable and often overlooked target audience.
If your brand isn’t shaping the narrative and providing context, most likely someone else is. Worse yet, your brand is nowhere in the awareness cycle and cultural conversation.
The digital sphere can be dazzling, word of mouth is its stable, original trailblazer relative with long-proven tried and true results. The conversation with consumers is happening, that’s not the question. The question is, is your brand taking an active or passive stance?
2. Engagement builds loyalty.
Consumer engagement is one of the top ways to build loyalty. When a consumer engages directly and personally with the brand, they are more likely to become and remain loyal customers. In doing so, they willingly, joyfully and often unintentionally espouse the brand as it’s now a part of them and their lifestyle.
Over the decade we’ve been around — in addition to being tapped frequently by consumer brands — we have been sought out by those who desire a ‘consumer-like’ experience for their internal team, partners or a target that defies the traditional tender for product, service or offering relationship.
Lyft | Nationwide Brand Launch | Driver Rallies
Prior to launching the brand and service in all it’s go-hard-or-go-home glory to the public-at-large, the first priority was to bring it to the people who built the brand, keep it running and are the face of it, the driver community. That buy-in was essential for the ride-sharing app to claim its rightful spot as a top contender in the space.
Grand Marnier | Annual Award Ceremony
A distinctive celebratory event for the internal international team was highly curated and architected. Two-parts cocktail, one-part formal dinner, the evening was garnished with an award-meets-photo-op ceremony that highlighted top performers across the company. The hard working hustlers who contribute to the brand’s success every day enjoyed a stylish, sexy, high-touch, top-tier experience fit for royalty, customers and those who embody and appreciate an epicurean lifestyle.
3. Loyalty leads to word of mouth recommendation.
An effective consumer engagement marketing strategy enables brands to introduce a product, service or offering via a rich, FOMO-inducing experience that collapses the consumer adoption model:
{awareness → trial → affinity → recommendation → repeat purchase}
What once was an unknown brand or product transitions into a mainstay for many. Those touched by the brand naturally tell others about it, who also tell others and so on creating a group of adopters.
Consumers unknowingly coach one another based on their own brand awareness and preferences.
We all have brands that are a part of who we are. For example, I love Health-Ade Pink Lady Apple kombucha. My friend, never having heard of it before, let alone purchasing it, started stocking it for when I come over. It’s now become a part of her grocery list whether I’m around or not. We discovered her daughter loves the same flavor I do. Straight from momma’s mouth — it is a way better option than juice — which she was having a tricky time weaning her daughter off. When anyone purchases a gift for me, they skip Amazon and support their favorite BIPOC-owned small businesses instead or write a check to a charitable organization of my choosing.
It’s to a brand’s benefit to segment out their target constituencies and be sure they engage with all of them in meaningful ways. A community of advocates sustains itself as loyalists consistently bring newbies into the fold as they move through their day and organically espouse and tout the brands they fancy.
Top consumer engagement marketing examples
Consumer engagement marketing is effective and strategic when the programming is crafted with the primary goal at the ❤️-center, the customer journey then maps to those goals with clearly defined audience outcomes — what is the desire for them to think, feel and do — which is then wrapped in striking creative and brought to life via flawless production.
Consumer engagement marketing has as many expressions as it does target segments.
1. Experiential Marketing
When consumer engagement marketing comes to mind, the most frequently imagined scenario is a direct-to-consumer brand activating in a public space, with hired brand ambassadors guiding guests through the architected customer journey. However, an often-overlooked type of experiential activation engages internal audiences, who are also consumers and should be treated accordingly.
From March 2020 to October 2021 and beyond, we experienced the shift firsthand, whereby the majority of consumer engagement/experiential marketing activations were for internal audiences. While the target shifted, the essence of what compromises a highly crafted consumer engagement program did not. Clients came to us specifically for the distinctively curated, stylized, flawless activations that are generally known to be reserved for the paying kind of customer target.
In an experiential activation we produced for Gilead, the brand’s target consumer was its internal team. Their workforce was fatigued and overworked in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. The leadership team wanted to do something meaningful to show their appreciation and reinvigorate their workforce.
Instead of your typical corporate-branded sweatshirt, reusable water bottle or recyclable bag, team members received artisan gifts delivered to their homes worldwide with an Insta-worthy, influencer-level unboxing experience.
Each gift was delivered in a crisp parcel wrapped with a satin ribbon. After opening the package, recipients found a wax sealed-card with their name elegantly scrolled in custom calligraphy atop crinkle filler paper. The note expressed gratitude and explained the gift — eco-friendly, ethically sourced handmade glasses from a woman-owned business in Mexico.
The feedback on the gifts was incredible. While the glasses were beautiful on their own, it was the complete package {pun intended} that turned a simple gift of gratitude into a memorable experience.
2. Pop-up Specific Marketing
Having a favorite client or activation is the same as having a favorite child, it’s a known no-no. That said, we are quite keen of the JUST Egg product launch. The roving international 5-city experiential tour introduced a new-not-easy-to-understand product to a wide audience of consumers.
The campaign featured food truck activations, distribution of product bites and digital influencer and media partnerships. To pull off the pop-ups for the plant-based product, we designed a botany-forward custom environment with a distinctive narrative shaped around the individual city where the pop-up was happening. From a decked-out mini Airstream-esque happy camper to a full-scale Greenhouse Cafe with a functional kitchen — whose foundation was a slab of concrete — the creative was eye-catching and inviting, effectively luring the target consumer to check out what was happening, take a taste and personally be welcomed into the brand.
Through the pop-up marketing effort, the brand generated awareness and adoption in a vibrant, unexpected, engaging and delicious way. Visitors received special offers sending them to market-specific retail outlets to facilitate product purchase.
3. Digital Engagement
Four weeks into planning Lagunitas’ National Sales and Marketing meeting, the event shifted from live to virtual.
Instead of turning the original plan for a rich and engaging event into a basic Zoom or Teams conference, the show went on…line in a late night TV-style format. We recreated the brand’s most meaningful part of campus as a set and crafted a live, bingeable broadcast complete with monologues, drama, skits, presentations, striking creative, live DJ and emcee, wardrobe changes and more.
Interactivity and consumer engagement were built into the production via QR code-driven giveaways, Q&As and a proper award ceremony. Facilitating compelling two-way audience engagement takes on many forms.
Consumer Engagement Examples | Key Takeaways
Employees are consumers and ambassadors
> One could comfortably state the most important kind
Consumer engagement is for all brands
> It is not a lever to be pulled for select brands only — it’s suited toward EVERY type of business
Pop-ups are an effective form of experiential marketing
> They are way more than just sampling programs
Virtual doesn’t = less than
> Acknowledge and embrace it as an available, viable and effective option
> Stop apologizing for it
Digital fatigue is real
> Build a dynamic show that captures and keeps attendee’s attention
Partner with a consumer engagement agency
Creating effective activations and experiences that facilitate real and valuable connections between the brand and the audience is a strategic, logistical, time-consuming, knowledge-based endeavor. For effective consumer engagement campaigns that produce meaningful results, we recommend partnering with an experienced agency.
At MKMCreative, we have decades of experience crafting moments that build lifelong bonds between brands and consumers.
Check out our expansive collection of consumer engagement marketing examples in our extensive portfolio.
Let’s make marketing magic happen together. Get in touch.
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