Introduction
Experiential ideation is rising in popularity within the business world. Experiential ideation is a creative process that gets us thinking outside of our usual box and into a different context, all while grounding the process in learning about the new context. It also gets you thinking about your marketing from your target market’s point of view, which can give you valuable insight into whether your campaign will resonate with them.
In this post, we explore experiential ideation’s popularity and investigate what is experiential ideation in marketing. After that, we’ll fill you in about what’s involved in the process and how you could use experiential ideation to grow your business.
What is Experiential Ideation?
Experiential ideation is a two-step process involving group learning and an idea generation session. First, the team members will get together for a group learning session that’s related to the area where an innovative solution is desired. This could be in marketing, sales, or upper management, just to name a few departments you could involve in the process.
Experiential ideation tasks us with reinventing creative thinking and challenging the assumptions we have about our organization, our products and services, and our industry. With that in mind, following the group learning session, team members engage in an idea generation session grounded in the first session’s learning.
Emphasis on the experiential aspect of learning isn’t new. Experiential education at all levels of schooling has rapidly increased in popularity in North America over the past few decades, so it’s fitting that an experiential element has made its way into the business world. People learn best when they can immerse themselves in the learning process, and experiential education — and ideation — does exactly that.
Experiential Ideation in Marketing
Experiential ideation can be used by marketing teams in a few different ways. Ideation is a consumer-centric process; after all, ideas won’t work if they aren’t relevant to the specific business or its industry. At its core, experiential ideation is a consultation to determine what’s working, what needs improvement, and what outcomes are desired as a result of the changes.
Experiential ideation provides you with the opportunity to change roles and look at your in-the-works marketing campaign from your target market’s perspective. Based on their values, behaviours, needs, desires, and history of interactions with your brand, how will they receive your campaign? Will they be eager to get in on it, or will they give it the cold shoulder? Evaluating your marketing plan by experiencing it for yourself can give you valuable insights to revise your plan accordingly.
Experiential ideation is especially useful in a fusion marketing approach as the ideation process asks that you look at everything at your disposal — from your team’s capabilities to delivery methods to the budget — before constructing your marketing plan.
Conclusion
Experiential ideation is extremely useful in marketing, especially when you’ve hit a wall and need inspiration. This process fosters lifelong learning, which benefits your team as a whole as well as individual members.
When you think about it, experiential ideation in marketing just makes sense: what better way to get the most out of your creative talent than to challenge them with learning something new and asking them to apply it to the next campaign?
