I came across Robert Slater’s book Jack Welch & The G.E. Way: Management Insights and Leadership Secrets of the Legendary CEO on the dusty shelves of a second-hand bookstore.

I learned about Jack Welch and his revolutionary contribution to the recent history of General Electric, one of the most important companies of our age, after reading this inspiring book.

No matter how you look at it, Welch’s ability to change and transform a company that was already profitable and functional when he took over, by seeing the future, is a big deal. He could have chosen to stay in his comfort zone and receive his salary and year-end bonuses. However, it is a very brave move for him to make his choice to prepare his company for the future.

The most important thing that I remembered from this book, which I read in great detail, was that although the way most jobs in the world are done remains similar, their definition has evolved from production to service. Although I sometimes have difficulty understanding how a product that emerges after a production process is perceived as a service, there are many things I try to grasp from Welch.

Yesterday, when you were shopping, you mostly bought things you could hold in your hand. This started to include services, things that you could not see but still provided you with some kind of benefit, and we need to talk about a new type of shopping: experience.

What is experience marketing?

This marketing method directly targets users/consumers and focuses on providing people with an unforgettable, impressive experience with the brand while using any product or service of the brand and making them want to use the product/service offered by the brand again.

Today, brands have many written, visual and even audio channels to tell about themselves, but the focus of experience marketing is on feeling to tell about the brand. In other words, all activities designed to ensure that the consumer tries the product or service offered by the brand in person and makes a purchase decision after this can be considered as part of experience marketing.

Why has experience marketing become important?

While older generation consumers are used to buying and using a product after paying for it, the consumption preferences of the new generation are completely different. Each new generation – since Z – has different demands regarding using a product or service, and the consumption model has evolved from paying for a product and owning it to buying it after trying it – if I like it.

The most important reason for the widespread use of the purchasing model by trying it is that there are many products with the same function in a certain category on the market as substitutes for each other. When there are many substitute products on the market, the most meaningful, simple, low-budget and highest-return way for the manufacturer to explain that their product is the best on the market is to have the consumer try the product.

Why should you include experience marketing in your marketing activities?

Visual ads are a strong partner in product marketing, I agree, but they are not as strong as a direct experience with a product. Therefore, experience marketing is a good way for the consumer to remember a product or service.

Another aspect of experience marketing is connected to social media. People share their good experiences as well as their bad ones on their social media accounts, and there is a high probability that an experience offered by the brand and liked by the consumer will be transferred to social media.

Today, every marketing specialist – regardless of their level, finds a way to connect an offline event to an online event, depending on the budget they have. Therefore, an experience activity also means visibility on social media.

Case studies on experience marketing

I think we all agree that coffee is no longer an ordinary drink. Coffee is now a part of our morning rituals and meetings; it is an indispensable companion to meetings with friends and even dates.

Therefore, when I want to make a case study on experience marketing, coffee is the first example that comes to my mind, the easiest and most common one that everyone can understand.

After reading this article, I want you to go to a Starbucks store (or any chain coffee store near you) and observe what happens from the moment you enter the store.

  • A barista asks you what you want to drink and writes your name on the glass (some stores now use stickers)
  • You order the drink you want to drink.

While another barista was making coffee, you walked past a counter full of coffee machines, syrups, and milk, took your coffee, prepared exactly as you wanted it, sat down on one of the low, dark, sloping-backed armchairs or wooden chairs, and started looking around.

  • You hear relaxing music that is turned up just enough to drown out the chatter and noise in the environment.
  • You are very comfortable in the armchair or chair you are sitting in and these furniture do not make you want to get up and leave.
  • There is a comfortable and friendly atmosphere, the wooden furniture gives a sense of warmth.
  • With the free WiFi, you can sit there for as long as you want, relax, work or have meetings at the large meeting tables and make new business connections etc.

What I’m trying to explain here is simply that each stage – and I’ve written it in bold – represents an experience that the brand offers you while you’re in a Starbucks store.

  • Your name is written on the glass: Personalization.
  • Your drink is prepared the way you want it: Customization.
  • A comfortable environment, WiFi and music are provided: Making you feel at home, relaxing and feeling good.

These are probably the top reasons why many people go to Starbucks when their competitors have better coffee and why they want to spend time in Starbucks stores.

You can make your coffee at home, even better, and you have invested a lot in it. But there is one thing you can’t replace; the feeling of being there. This lack is what draws you back to a Starbucks store.

Google has long since ceased to be just a search engine. Along with a comprehensive advertising network, well-functioning cloud storage and document management applications, and Android, one of the two most widely used operating systems in the world, are the most important components of Google’s own ecosystem.

Google has been bringing together the professional versions of many services in its portfolio, such as Gmail, Drive, Docs, Meet, Calendar, Translate, Gemini and Veo, and has started to offer them collectively since 2020.

Although there are many brands that do what Google does and have competitors in the same segment as Google, the most important feature that distinguishes Google’s Workspace product is its holistic user experience.

When you start a Workspace account, you don’t just become a user of the product, you start living in it. While working on documents, other users you add as collaborators can also see and edit the document, view the history of the tables, and even edit a table together or go over the final version of the document while having a meeting.

Regardless of technical capacities, the experience that Google offers to users with this product is about shaping business life and shows that work no longer has to be done between four walls, in sunlit offices or in glass cubes. In other words, it radically changes and transforms an important concept in life and takes business life out of its classical definition and gives it a completely different form.

Transforming documentation experience with cloud base document management systems

In the past, when we needed to work together on a document, we would send the document to each other via flash memory, Bluetooth or e-mail, even if we were located side by side in the same office.

The working together situation on applications such as Docs and Tables in Workspace is quite revolutionary in terms of being able to transfer the experience to others.

Sharing a link to a document with another user, or sharing a screen during a meeting or adding a plan to the calendar transforms the event into a kind of whole experience, thus the experience ceases to be personal and becomes community-based.

It would not be wrong to say that Google Workspace has rapidly and irreversibly changed the way most people work by eliminating the need to be tied to a physical office, increasing productivity by enabling joint and simultaneous collaboration, and speeding up the process by facilitating sharing behavior.

When you come into an IKEA store, unlike most stores that sell furniture, you find a slice of life. Inside an IKEA store, a sofa set is not just a sofa set, and you can even find toys scattered on the floor next to a bed. Therefore, IKEA is not just a store that sells furniture and home accessories, it also offers a life experience.

IKEA is the most widely exemplified brand in the field of marketing and, frankly, it is also enjoyable to exemplify. The main reason for this is that it has successfully positioned experience marketing within its marketing communication activities.

IKEA stores, located inside buildings covered in blue and yellow, are a very striking concept in terms of being designed to be livable, perceptible and sensorially perceptible. The brand’s aim to establish a bond with the consumer is not only to sell things from the shelves; it is also to connect with people visiting the store, create a story with them and thus create an emotional impact.

Today, no matter which IKEA store you go to, you will see people sitting and looking around in the living spaces designed inside the cubes, examining the accessories and cabinets, trying on the armchairs and even lying on the beds. People want to see the products there in their own homes, and the state of imagination is the main component of experience marketing.

These kinds of touch points that IKEA provides to people visiting the store are very valuable in terms of understanding whether the products they want to buy are really the products they sell. And they manage to present this not through advertising, but through personal experience inside the store.

Whether you want to deliver a product to the end consumer or try to get as many people as possible to use a service you offer; experience marketing is one of the important topics that will exist in the future of marketing communication.

Products and services are becoming more and more similar to each other day by day, and the way to differentiate these products from each other is through the consumer using these products and understanding how they will feel when using them.

What needs to be accepted is, that no one has enough money, time and desire to pay full price for each product and try them and find ways to return them if they don’t work. If your product doesn’t work, let the next one come.

Another aspect that makes experience marketing important is its structure that allows for feedback collection.

It is important for products to be opened for trial before purchase and for feedback to be received about the product. The user liked the product; okay, which parts did they like; what can you do better? If they didn’t like it, why? What was missing, at what stage did it not work and what are the aspects that need to be improved?

Simply, the cup of coffee you drink is no longer just coffee. With a cup of coffee, many kinds of experiences and stories now come with it. So, those of us working in marketing communications now have to build some kind of experience with the brands we work with, in addition to selling something.

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