The pitch: Touch and feel now the name of the game

By KEVIN KENRICK*

Marketing is undergoing a quiet revolution. Smart marketers worldwide are substituting the "show-and-tell" techniques of the 20th century with "touch and feel". It's the age of experiential marketing.

And there's good reason. Consumers, dazed by frenetic media images and suffering attention deficit disorder, are being assaulted with ever more noise.

This guarantees only one thing - deafness.

In this environment, it takes a great experience to be heard - the sort of experience that appeals to all the senses.

It's the sort of experience that comes from marketers who understand that people fundamentally don't change. Consumers still want to believe, and they're as capable of prolonged and profound engagement with a brand as ever.

They're just after a different type of engagement.

They're demanding experiences that take them out of their everyday existence.

At the American Express Viaduct Harbour, we've created a showcase touch-feel-and-try Telecom and Team New Zealand experience - the Telecom Shed.

More than 360,000 people have shared this experience, grinding and winching on authentic Black Boat gear and getting as close to Team New Zealand as it's possible to get without getting their feet wet.

Visitors to the Shed have undergone a transformative Telecom brand experience.

They've been sending video emails, emailing photos from mobile phones, remote working and watching yacht racing via miniature holograms.

The Telecom Shed is helping transform the way people see Telecom. People are realising that we're in the experience business. We're about the possibilities that technology can bring you.

We're not alone in this. Others are also recognising that while product is important, the total brand experience is what counts.

They're making their marketing a multi-sensory consumable good - and are prospering as a result.

No one understands this more implicitly than the beer industry, whose "pubs in fancy dress" - Irish and Belgian theme bars and the like - are proliferating.

This is undistilled experiential marketing, based on the knowledge that the better the experience, the more repeat visitors it will attract.

And if there's any remaining doubt about people's insatiable thirst for compelling experience - and the ability of an experience to make even the most unbelievable believable - just think Two Towers.

Recently I sat in a dark room with about 100 other dazed, confused and cynical consumers watching Peter Jackson's latest. What we watched was sufficiently far-fetched to be ludicrous - a fairy story about dwarves, elves, wizards and hobbits.

Yet, every one of us was spellbound by that single magical experience for three straight hours.

* Kevin Kenrick is general manager of Telecom Mobile. Previously he was general manager, marketing, for Telecom Sales and Service and marketing manager for XTRA. The Telecom Shed is his brainchild.