Experiential Marketing: How to Get Customers to Sense, Feel, Think, Act, and Relate to Your Company and Brands

Engaging, enlightening, provocative, and sensational are the words people use to describe compelling experiences and these words also describe this extraordinary book by Bernd Schmitt.

Moving beyond traditional "features-and-benefits" marketing, Schmitt presents a revolutionary approach to marketing for the branding and information age. Schmitt shows how managers can create holistic experiences for their customers through brands that provide sensory, affective, and creative associations as well as lifestyle marketing and social identity campaigns.

In this masterful handbook of tools and techniques, Schmitt presents a battery of business cases to show how cutting-edge companies use "experience providers" such as visual identity, communication, product presence, Web sites, and service to create different types of customer experiences. To illustrate the essential concepts and frameworks of experiential marketing, Schmitt provides:

SENSE cases on Nokia mobile phones, Hennessy cognac, and Procter & Gamble's Tide Mountain Fresh detergent;

FEEL cases on Hallmark, Campbell's Soup, and Häagen Dazs Cafés in Asia, Europe, and the United States;

THINK cases on Apple Computer's revival, Genesis ElderCare, and Siemens;

ACT cases on Gillette's Mach3, the Milk Mustache campaign, and Martha Stewart Living;

RELATE cases on Harley-Davidson, Tommy Hilfiger, and Wonderbra.

Using the New Beetle and Sony as examples, Schmitt discusses the strategic and implementation intricacies of creating holistic experiences for customers. In an intriguing final chapter, he presents turn-around techniques such as "Objective: To Dream," "Send in the Iconoclasts," and "Quit the Bull," to show how traditional marketing firms can transform themselves into experience-oriented organizations.

This book will forever change your perception of customers, marketing, and brands -- from Amtrak and Singapore Airlines to Herbal Essences products and Gwyneth Paltrow.

Bernd H. Schmitt has consulted, and given lectures and seminars, in more than twenty countries around the world. The founder and director of Columbia's Marketing Management executive program, Professor Schmitt is also a frquent keynote speaker at marketing and management conferences. He is co-author of Marketing Aesthetics (Free Press).