This presentation takes you through the first steps on how to make a succesful brand activation concept.

1. Brand activation
Do something awesome with people

2. What is
brand activation?
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3. A suggested definition:
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Using brand activation, we create experiences and
conversations with consumers and invite them to
participate in our communication. This takes place in
the real world and/or via digital or social media.
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4. Why should you use
brand activation?
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5. Traditional marketing speaks to consumers.
Brand activation speaks with consumers.
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6. Traditional marketing
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7. Dale’s cone of experience
People understand
x % of what they
10%
Read
20%
Hear
Traditional advertising
Traditional branding (advertising) is a visual and
30%
See
50%
Hear and see
making promises to consumers.
70%
Say or write
Brand activation
90%
Say as they do a thing
verbal weapon owned by marketing, which is all about
Activation means involving and engaging consumers in the
brand. With activation, the brand and consumers share
100%
Do the real thing
ownership, since consumers help to create the content.
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8. Brand activation
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9. When we as people participate, it creates a
stronger bond between us and the brand,
because it makes us think, feel, and react,
instead of just listening and seeing.
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10. Does brand activation create sales?
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11. Yes, but not necessarily in the short term. If you’re
trying to sell a bunch of cheap mobile telephone
subsciptions, it’s probably not the right approach.
It’s a long-term investment in the brand that can
help build up a fan base. In other words, it will
indirectly lead to sales.
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12. Many of the most-loved brands in the world are good
at activating their consumers.
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13. How do you create a good
brand activation concept?
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14. The concept
The quality of the concept should be so good that the consumer
wants to share it with others. If it lacks credibility, it will be an
immediate failure.
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15. Is the concept activate-able?
Will it make me take action?
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16. 3 - #værtilstede (be present)
3, a mobile provider, wanted to position itself as a
leader within mobile telephony and mobile broadband,
and as a company that had taken ownership of
technology and of its network.
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3 had an offline communication campaign with the
slogans ‘Feel the rush’, ‘Feel the freedom’ and ‘Feel the
sound’, which ended with the pay-off ‘The network of
the future.’ The challenge was that this campaign was
supposed to be continued digitally and involve
consumers. But with a concept that was hard to
activate, Konstellation had to find an alternative.
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Smartphones are a part a daily life, but the way people
are constantly focusing on them while ignoring the
people in front of them has become controversial. Our
concept #værtilstede, with its slight ambiguity, put the
focus on online and off line presence, and let 3 be the
facilitator.
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17. Relevance for consumers
• How important is this for me? Is it something I find interesting? Do I have
something to say? Does it connect with me emotionally?
• In the case from 3 #værtilstede, we discovered the topic was highly relevant, since a
lot of consumers had something to say but previously had not had a voice.
Relevance is about how important an issue is for us and how much we are willing to
invest.
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18. Value for the consumer
• What’s the return on participation? What do I get out of it? What’s the reward?
• The value is not just a question of $ or prizes. It’s also social capital I can show to
my friends, identity creation, something that solves a problem, knowledge,
• The time the consumer invests must correspond to what the consuemr gets back.
• Prizes can be used to attract participatns, but if that’s the only means to so so, the
concept is too weak. Always seek to create a concept where the prize is not the
reason to take part.
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19. Value
Degree of involvement = value + relevance
The degree of involvement is the sum of the
relevance and the value for consumers.
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The degree of involvement is basically the
time the consumer is willing to use
interacting with a given brand.
Relevance
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20. Sympathy
• If we ask for something from consumers, we need to be willing to give them
something back. Kindness and respect will help strengthen the relationship
between the brand and the consumer.
• The kindness could be a gi", but it can also be a kindness to take up a topic like 3 #værtilstede in order to give consumers a voice.
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21. Relative simplicity
• Our concept and solution can’t be too complex for our target group to understand.
But it all depends on how much we can expect our target group to get involved. If
the value and relevance are high (hard core fans), the concept can be complex,
because the user will be willing to give up much more time and energy to get
involved. On the other hand, if the target group is broad, we need to make it very
simple to take part.
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22. Launch
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23. Your activation must be promoted
Owned
Earned
Paided
Start with your own channels
and use some energy to get
the media to write about it. If
the idea is good and
consumers want to share the
content with each other, that
will deliver a much better ROI
than if you work with an
80-20 rule - media vs.
production - like in
traditional campaigns.
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24. Listen, learn and re-enforce, when you have
launched and put aside a budget for it. You can get
a lot out of this!
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25. What value does it
create?
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26. For the consumer
• Experiences and entertainment
• Identity creation through social capital
• Knowledge and learning
• Prizes and money
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27. For the brand!
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28. Fans (ambassadors)
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This may be the most important value. Fans! These are the
people we want to reach, but also our most important
resource, since they will help us reach their friends. If we
build up a large fan base, we can re-activate them in
connection with events like product launches.
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29. Content
If we invite consumers to create our marketing, we’ll
also get a lot of unique content that we can use in
other contexts, or that can give us ideas for new
initiatives.
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30. Telenor created a concept in which usergenerated digital content was later moved over
to television.
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31. Awareness
If our concept is so strong that our fans want to share it,
we’ve created the basis for a viral spread that will expose us
to consumers we’d otherwise never get in contact with. It
also increases awareness, because a friend-to-friend
recommendation is the strongest marketing possible.
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32. Knowledge and permissions
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With digital activation, we can get a lot of data about our
participants that gives us information about who they are
and what they like. We can also get permission to contact
them again. Of course, this must be done with deep
respect and in relation to individual interests.
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33. Evolution
Our brand will evolve on the basis of this involvement and
this content users help us create. Through content,
dialogue and interaction with consumers, new possibilities
arise to give our brand a more organic size, in which are
fans are part of influencing and developing it.
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34. 5 to take home
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35. 5 to take home
• Activation is an investment in your brand.
• Talk with people - not to people
• Involvement degree = value + relevance
• Promote your activation and allocate a budget to re-enforcing it
• Brand activation helps a brand evolve
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36. Thank you
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Nicolai Elmqvist
CEO & Partner @Konstellation
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+45 29 44 41 08
ne@konstellation.dk
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