Q&A with Kyle Diercks,
VP of Events and Alternative Retail Strategy

In the retail sales and marketing industry, the term “experiential marketing” is bantered around like an old-fashioned Pete Sampras serve and volley. With so much of MarketStar’s business being about creating meaningful brand experiences, we wanted to get some further insight on how that term relates to MarketStar’s new Alternative Retail service offering. We turned to MarketStar’s Vice President of Events and Alternative Retail Strategy, Kyle Diercks, for a question-and-answer discussion.

How do you define experiential marketing?

I see experiential marketing as a one-on-one engagement between a company’s offering, either product or service, and the consumer themselves. That moment of interaction is the experience. That experience can vary in delivery, but for us, it’s that moment of true interaction, that perhaps for the first time, defines for a consumer their whole brand experience related to a particular product.

How does your definition relate to MarketStar’s service offering?

The correlation between that definition and MarketStar is terrific because what we are already known for is creating a connection between a brand and the consumer, whether it be through advocacy, assisted selling, training or events. What we are looking to do now is extend that advocacy to another level and provide expertise directly to the consumer at the first point of engagement. This may or may not occur at the moment of sale. We are looking to catch consumers at moments in time where they are open to the experience and can provide an ‘aha-moment’ of brand communication. The focus could vary from brand awareness, sales-on-site initiatives or product sampling.

What sets MarketStar’s experiential offering apart?

What sets our offering apart is the people we surround the consumer with at that moment of interaction, their affinity to the brand and the training and knowledge we have provided them prior to the engagement.

The advocacy component has traditionally been secondary in the traditional experiential marketing model. Someone who is simply sampling gum in a store today might be offering samples of energy drinks tomorrow; they are merely facilitating the experience.

At MarketStar, we have years of global experience in shaping the consumer engagement. Our goal is to provide for the consumer a level of commitment to the advocacy component they won’t find anywhere else. We do that through the level of attention we place on who we hire and the processes we have in place to ensure advocates match the brands they are hired to represent. Others may try to wow the consumer with dynamic kiosks or fancy multimedia presentations, and we can do all that for sure, but what we will hang our hat on is the quality of people we hire and retain to create a meaningful, behavior-modifying engagement for the consumer.

In addition, we know nothing is more critical than relevant data in relationship to each engagement. We integrate intelligence reporting from the point of engagement in everything we do to ensure we provide measurable, trackable accounting for each initiative.

What is the future of the experiential service offering at MarketStar?

We want to be known for more than just brand advocacy at the point of sale. We are hoping to bring an elevated sense of awareness to the consumer by creating opportunities for them to literally interact with the product, whether it be 3D television or the latest tech gadget. We want to create these experiences for the consumer, outside of the normal retail environment and before they’ve determined what brand affinity they may or may not have. We have created several new programs to help define the way we communicate our offering to our customers, as well as created strategic partnerships with other Omnicom affiliates to further extend our service offering.

What can you tell us about those new programs?

The InField Experience is a partnership between MarketStar, our sister Omnicom companies and the Westfield Malls. This partnership gives companies a chance to create unique experiential environments within malls throughout the country. We’ve already successfully launched eight programs through the InField model and we are excited that in addition to the extensive traffic Westfield offers, other malls are joining the program, which will only add more opportunity for companies to extend their reach and create more dynamic experience-based interactions.

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