Derren Brown's Psychological Theme Park Ride

Derren Brown launched an experiential campaign to promote the opening of his new theme park ride, which will be opening March 2016, which involved two life-sized (extremely creepy) dolls.

His new 13 minute theme park ride is said to be the first ‘immersive psychological attraction’ designed to ‘manipulate the human mind’. His method to launch this new theme park ride was to send two life-sized dolls out around London one early morning across the Northern Line on the London Underground, reportedly playing with a toy train set at Hamleys and pushing an empty antique pram along Tube platforms. 

The stunt was aimed to create a taster of what his new theme park ride will be like, and Derren Brown has said that he will be using this theme of Victorian in his work, and reflects the idea that we are “moving toward a future where theme park attractions not only give you a physical experience but also play with your mind and the concept of what is real”.

This experiential marketing campaign is creating a memory for all of the commuters that saw these dolls. Due to the appearance of the dolls of them being created as creepy Victorian dolls, which look very out of place, will create a memory in the mind of all of the commuters that see them. 

Starbucks Red Cups

Christmas brings many traditions back that we see companies take part in annually, and Starbucks Red Cups are one of these. As part of the launch of these iconic red cups making an appearance again, the popular coffee shop chain Starbucks created a four-metre high installation made to look like a Christmas tree, created from Starbucks red cups.

The installation was erected in Kings Cross’s train station in London and required customers to tweet in with the hashtag #RedCups and share their red cup moments with pictures. This idea of sharing images and tweets on twitter and Instagram was linked to their social campaign where they wanted customers to tweet their experiences throughout the Christmas period. With each time the hashtag being displayed a limited edition emoji of a Red Cup would appear.

This campaign in London aim was to involve their customers passing by asking them to tweet with #RedCups and the more tweets that were submitted the more the Christmas tree lit up. This campaign is an example of Sensory Marketing as Starbucks were promoting their festive drinks over the Christmas period, by using the human senses to market their product. 

Vision, the four metre high installation was used to attract the attention of consumers. The installation was situated in the middle of a busy London train station and is hard to miss by all commuters passing by. Consumers that were attracted over and took part in these campaign were presented with a gift card from Starbucks to use over the Christmas period, as a way of thanking their customers. As well vision, smell is another sense used. The installation was designed to smell like Starbuck’s product, the Gingerbread Latte, which is a limited edition drink at this season and is a popular drink for this company. 

This smell is something that is aimed to stay in the thoughts of the consumer in hope that they remember about this product later in the day, potentially whilst passing a Starbucks, resulting them in buying a product. 

Not On The High Street: Gift-O-Matic

Another experiential marketing campaign that took place during the Christmas period in 2015 was the “Gift-O-Matic” by Not On The High Street, which was a twitter-powered vending machine. 

Not On The High Street is a website that sells unique handmade gifts, made by small businesses and their goal is to: “to hunt out the most original items from the best creative small businesses, and bring them together in one place, making it easy for people to browse and buy.”

Perfect for last minute shoppers, two of these vending machines were placed in two of London’s busiest train stations, Waterloo and Paddington, on 21^st December.

The machines will interact with the customers by getting them to tweet in the company @notonthehighstreet with their location and a hashtag that perfectly describes the person they are buying the present for, choosing from 5 different personality types such as: #Foodie, #PetLover or #Gardener. 

Customers were then given dispensed a free gift. Inside was a range of gifts that were all prodicts from 5,000 small businesses that are featured on the “Not On The High Street” website. 

The vending machines were reportedly not hard to miss in the busy train stations as they were all brightly coloured with each present dispensed individually gift grabbed, with Not On the High Street bright coloured gift wrap with huge bows covering them. Vision is the most targeted sensory in this campaign as it is using bright colours and oversized material to catch the eye of the consumer gaining their attention. The gift wrap was purposely covered in the company’s name as a reminder for the consumer where the gift came from with details of the company website. So in the future the consumer can access this website again. Which is spreading the word of this company through suppling consumers with free gifts to get a taster of products are on website.

Not On The High Street’s aims of this campaign were to attract new customers and giving them, and existing customers, a new surprise for them and a delight at Christmas, whilst trying to give them some ease to their Christmas Shopping (especially those who had left it to the last minute). By getting the customers to tweet in it is spreading the word about Not On The High Street, expanding their market, by getting their customers to actually spread the word for them. 

The machines were said to be attracting attention from the moment they were opened and were a great way to spread Christmas cheer, as well as getting the name of the company Not On The High Street spread around. The company supports small businesses so each of the gifts given were unique and can all be found on the company’s website, the idea behind this way to avoid panic buying and to give a present that was thoughtful. In hope that in the following years, the customers remember this website and use it.