The IXMA stimulates business success by improving the understanding of experiential marketing and helping organizations provide effective, engaging, positive and memorable interactions with their brands.

“Markets have undergone a profound transformation after decades of top-down corporate messaging. As you read this, the marketing world is changing, and with it the way business will be conducted for decades to come. This change is being demanded by the enlightened and empowered consumer – the so-called prosumer – who no longer responds to a media-propelled “brand essence.” Most current advertising still relies on obsessive proliferation of the brand through mass media that seek economies of scale – the more eyeballs, the better. But consumers want more than mass messages sent to eyeballs. They want respect, recognition and relevant communication, and they’ve indicated that the best way to give it to them is through experiences that are personally relevant, memorable, sensory, emotional and meaningful. Consumers have changed dramatically, and the brand world must change to meet their needs and desires, or lose them to those that recognize the unique influences shaping the evolving marketplace.“

“Today, customers take product quality and a positive brand image as a given,” writes Columbia Business School guru Bernd H. Schmitt in the seminal book Experiential Marketing. “What they want is products, communications, and marketing campaigns that dazzle their senses, touch their hearts, and stimulate their minds – that deliver an experience.”

“It is those companies that can deliver the right experience to customers that will succeed in the global marketplace today. Businesses will live or die not by the attributes they promise, but by the experience they offer customers at every touch point – in the store, at the website, with the product, and through events and advertising. “Traditional marketing theories and practices are rapidly changing and becoming less relevant,” writes Erik Hauser, Director of the IXMA. “Experiential marketing is leading the way into the new marketing paradigm.”

Here is IXMA’s Manifesto:
        
1.        EXPERIENTIAL MARKETING must be predicated on one-on-one personal interaction between a marketer and a consumer.
2.        EXPERIENTIAL MARKETING will be conducted when the consumer chooses.
3.        EXPERIENTIAL MARKETING campaigns should clearly deliver a meaningful benefit to the consumer.
4.        EXPERIENTIAL MARKETING is based on engaging people.
5.        EXPERIENTIAL MARKETING must be based on individual experiences.
6.        EXPERIENTIAL MARKETING’s goal is to succeed using innovative approaches and tactics to reach out to consumers in creative, compelling ways.
7.        EXPERIENTIAL MARKETING is idealistic enough to empower the individual consumer and street-savvy enough to unleash the power of grassroots activation.
8.        EXPERIENTIAL MARKETING is about authenticity.
9.        EXPERIENTIAL MARKETING assumes that the entire world is media, and the entire universe is the consumer base.

Related Tags: XM, marketing, manifesto, experiential