---
title: "Traditional Marketing Is Failing; Experiential Marketing Is the Future"
description: "Traditional marketing centered on brands and products no longer fits the modern era. The key to marketing now lies in experience design that focuses on people, capturing their emotions and creating peak moments to drive desire."
author: "赵波、任文青"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
telephone: "+8615854817671"
published: "2021-08-05"
language: "en"
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# Traditional Marketing Is Failing; Experiential Marketing Is the Future

> Traditional marketing centered on brands and products no longer fits the modern era. The key to marketing now lies in experience design that focuses on people, capturing their emotions and creating peak moments to drive desire.

### **Click to read the original article for details**
### **Marketing centered on brands/products**
### **can no longer adapt to this era**
In the past, we talked about who the user is, and the construction of user profiles **only stayed at the external level of people.**
For example, if I want to sell a relatively youthful, high-priced beer, the user profile might be: first-tier city, 25-35 years old, male, white-collar, income over 10,000, programmer.
This way of segmentation completely ignores whether he likes our product's packaging, color, or taste.
In fact, who the user is, where he is, what job he has, what income, what age—none of that matters. What matters is whether he is a craft beer enthusiast, what kind of packaging might move him, what style and taste he likes, and what style and taste he dislikes.
The difference between the two approaches is that the former uses labels to abstract a collective, while the latter restores users to vivid individuals.
Why this shift?
**Essentially, it's a shift in discourse power.**
In the era of "traditional media + limited shelves," the core actions of marketing were in advertising and channels. Media communication solved the awareness problem, and channel coverage solved the delivery problem.
Users had no choice; whatever was displayed on supermarket shelves, consumers could only buy that. When customers have no choice, they think that what they can buy is what they need.
Large companies placed ads in centralized media to control public opinion, based on a one-way communication model of "I speak, you listen," driving users to choose specific products or services. Brand owners almost didn't need direct contact with users; they only needed to simply tell users: My product is what you need!
For example, "Afraid of getting heaty? Drink...?" "Often use your brain? Drink...?" "Xiangpiaopiao, annual sales can circle the earth so many times," and so on—all these ads follow this logic.
For brand owners, all marketing is essentially product/brand-centered, not user-centered.
However, with the rise of mobile internet, **"streaming media + infinite shelves" has completely transferred the sovereignty of choice to the users.**
Users can evaluate consumption experiences, review product and service quality. The key factor influencing users' purchase behavior has shifted from the brand's own promotion to the individual consumer's perception and experience.
When users have choice over products and information, people's consumption concepts change. Excessive supply also makes people no longer satisfied with material things alone, but more inclined toward psychological and spiritual needs.
It's no longer enough for products to merely have value, advantages, and selling points (features, efficacy). Users' visual senses, usage experience, and triggered emotions become increasingly sensitive and picky.
**Pursuing refinement, not quality; pursuing spiritual satisfaction, not material function; pursuing standing out, not conformity; pursuing wanting, not needing.**
Who you are doesn't matter to them at all. What matters is whether you can bring me an unexpected consumption experience. If not, or if there's any point that makes the user feel bad, the user will turn away without hesitation.
So now, marketing cannot just stay at self-centered promotion. The key to marketing is to stimulate customers' desire to buy, making them "want" it.
From "satisfying needs" to "stimulating wants," the core action of marketing must transform into: experience design centered on "people."
### **Centered on "people"**
### **Grasp inner emotions to design experiences**
What is experience?
Simply put, it's the emotions and feelings people have at a specific time, place, and environment. The English word "experience" comes from the Latin "experientia," meaning to explore, to test. According to Aristotle's explanation, **experience is sensory memory, formed by many similar memories coming together.**
Today, persuading users through advertising is very difficult. **We must use experience to let consumers build awareness of our products.** What does it mean to build awareness through experience? For example: When I pass by a Chaoshan beef hotpot restaurant and see the meat being cut by the chef in the open kitchen, I feel the meat is fresh, and it stimulates my desire to try it.
This is experience awareness built through vision.
**The core of experience is effectively mobilizing people's senses to stimulate their desire to consume and use.**
The senses are: vision, hearing, taste, smell, and touch. The more senses a user experience can mobilize, the deeper the memory effect.
These all need to be designed in specific scenarios. That is, giving "people" a good experience requires design.
Note that here we use "people," not "users," "customers," or "consumers."
Why?
When we use concepts like "users," "customers," or "consumers," what comes to mind is an abstract collective. But experience design **must restore the abstract collective to vivid individuals.**
What are the characteristics of people?
Setting aside external labels, people have emotions, experiences, and subjective judgment. Users' perception and experience of the world are dynamic and discontinuous.
The core of experiential marketing is to **mobilize people's inner emotional experiences and feelings to give them an unexpected experience with our products and services.**
According to data from the U.S. National Center for Biotechnology Information, the average attention span for people facing products was 12 seconds in 2000 and 8 seconds in 2015.
The speed at which people's attention spans shorten far exceeds the speed of the brain's natural evolution.
People's attention is hard to focus and sustain. Their impressions of your product, service, and brand are discontinuous and come only from certain "moments of truth" (MOT).
### **Using "moments of truth" as the key lever**
"Moments of truth" are the key lever for good experiential marketing. This originates from a concept proposed by Jan Carlzon, former president of Scandinavian Airlines, in the 1980s:
"We (SAS) carry 10 million passengers a year. Each passenger comes into contact with about 5 of our employees, and each contact lasts about 15 seconds. So these 50 million 15-second moments are our moments of truth. SAS must prove to passengers in these 50 million 15-second moments that SAS is their best choice."
Passengers' feelings about flying SAS determine their satisfaction, whether they are willing to continue flying, and whether they are willing to recommend it to others. These feelings are a collection of experiences, and within this collection, three moments are most critical.
**One is the moment of first contact.**
The impression users have when they first come into contact with your product is crucial; it sets the initial value of the user's inner feelings. In offline retail scenarios, it even determines whether they are willing to learn more and buy. In psychology, this is called the "primacy effect."
**Next are the peak moment and the end moment.**
Daniel Kahneman, in his book "Thinking, Fast and Slow," presented a viewpoint: People's perception of an experience is determined by two factors—the peak (whether positive or negative) and the feeling at the end. This is the Peak-End Rule.
Consumers' evaluation of a brand in their minds is not an average score, nor a total score; consumers only score at key moments.
So, **the core of doing experience well is not frequency, but seizing the key moments.**
How to seize them?
Summarized in three sentences:
**"Who?**
**Under what circumstances?**
**What do they feel?"**
**"Who" restores the user to a vivid person; "under what circumstances" specifies the scenario details—what time, what place, what environment; "what do they feel" starts from vision, hearing, taste, smell, touch, etc., to generate emotional experiences.**
An impressive "moment of truth" usually contains four emotional experiences:
**1. Joy: The feeling of focus, enjoyment, and excitement, which brings surprise and ritual, and can bring the key moment to its peak;**
**2. Insight: When people suddenly gain self-understanding, the awakening, disgust, heartbreak, or ecstasy can be remembered for a lifetime;**
**3. Pride: The self-satisfaction that arises when being affirmed or recognized;**
**4. Connection: When experiencing pain or achieving goals with others, the sense of group brings people closer.**
We often talk about user insight; it actually starts from these three sentences, capturing various emotions and feelings of "people" in real scenarios, which in turn helps us better design experiences.
Here we share a case:
At the end of last year, Chongqing Bashu Changchun School purchased a batch of Meijian plum wine from Jiangji Distillery as Spring Festival gifts for each teacher.
After receiving this need, the customization department of Jiangji Distillery did not provide standardized products to the school, but instead customized a batch of Meijian wine with each teacher's name on it. At the same time, to reflect the delicacy of the gift, Jiangji Distillery also tied a delicate ribbon.
As a result, many teachers were very happy when they received the gift. On one hand, they felt the school was very thoughtful, deeply experiencing the school's respect and admiration for each teacher. On the other hand, it also gave the teachers a strong sense of honor. During the Spring Festival, many teachers would proudly take out the product and share it with family and friends during gatherings.
The principal later sent a thank-you message to Jiangji Distillery, expressing that their creativity was really great.
When discussing this case with Mr. Yan, the general manager of Jiangji Distillery, he shared a very important viewpoint:
"
 _In Maslow's hierarchy, people have the need to be recognized and respected. Because human nature is to first focus on oneself, then on others. For example, when you find an old group photo, the instinctive first reaction is to find yourself._
 _So based on the above thinking, from a business dimension, it should be counter-human-nature. Starting from the basis of satisfying human nature, think about creating value from your user's perspective, and its value is produced from their demand side, and it is rigid enough._
 _From the demand perspective, from ultimate functionality, user experience, to brand core, in this way, users not only buy your product but also become active promoters of your brand._
"
The core of experiential marketing is experience design. Sort out the entire process from contact, to transaction, to repurchase and referral. From the user's perspective, find the most critical points, concentrate firepower, design with care, and create his peak experience.
### **Final words:**
Enterprises promote their products' features, efficacy, and value from their own perspective, just to sell them. The transaction amount is measured by numbers. This is typical transactional marketing.
In an era when users had no sovereignty of choice, traditional marketing methods brought success to many brands.
However, self-centered promotion has completely fallen behind the requirements of successful marketing in the current era.
Restoring users to "people," rather than simply labeling them from a demographic perspective, finding "moments of truth" based on real scenarios to design people's experiences, and completing the transformation from selling products to selling experiences—this is the homework every marketer must do well today.
 _-END-_
**PS**: From August 24-26, 2021, the 2021 (4th) China FMCG Conference hosted by New Distribution will open in Shanghai. **Focusing on industry trends + practical cases + growth connection as the core**, **3000** FMCG practitioners will gather.
10 thematic forums cover **new retail O2O, community group buying, short video and live e-commerce, distributor transformation, rise of new consumer brands, new alcoholic beverage interpretation, distribution B2B supply chain, omnichannel marketing, B2B2C new technology applications**, etc. Operators in each segment will bring the latest case interpretations.
Some of the confirmed heavyweight guests so far include: **1. Tao Shiquan, founder of Jiangxiaobai; **2. Yao Xuhong, general manager of Meiyijia Holdings Co., Ltd.; **3. Lu Xiuqiong, global expert partner at Bain & Company and former vice president of marketing for Coca-Cola China; **4. Chen Xiaodong, senior vice president of Nestlé Greater China; **5. Zhang Fujun, president of Lee Kum Kee Sauce Group China; **6. Bi Chaojiao, general manager of China Resources Snow Breweries (China) Marketing Center; **7. Yang Hongbin, vice president of Junlebao Dairy Group; **8. Yang Shun, COO of Lipton Greater China; **9. Zhang Yipeng, general manager of Kuaishou E-commerce SKA Brand Operations Center; **10. Li De, general manager of e-commerce at Gold Hong Ye Paper Group**.....**
**A grand gathering for FMCG people, you must be there!**
**Are you "watching" me?**


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