If all consumers had the same experience, then sharing their personalized posts to their friends on social media wouldn’t be all that exciting. Consumers’ lives are obviously all very different from one another. If we take a step back from thinking about their differences, we can indeed start to point out certain similarities in the lives of consumers that become a part of an experiential marketing campaign as they walk by a footprint or are approached by a street team.

Let’s take Josh, for example. Josh lives an ordinary life, one where most of us can relate to in one-way or another. Josh wakes up every morning and goes to work, where he talks to his colleagues, gets his work done on time, and then goes home.

On a random summer weekend, Josh has made plans to go to a music festival with his friends. As he is entering the festival grounds, his eye catches a cool looking tent near the main walkway. He talks to his friends and they agree that since there are no bands that they really want to see playing at the time, they’ll see what this tent is about.

As they approach the tent, they realize that there is more than one thing going on inside. They keep walking towards the tent, becoming more interested the closer they get. They reach a point where they are approached by a brand ambassador with an iPad.

The brand ambassador asks them if they know what’s going on inside of the tent and the consumers tell her that no, they were actually walking over here to find out what exactly this place is. She then explains the elaborate marketing plan in simple words to the consumers, who are automatically psyched about the innovative idea that has just appeared in their lives.

They decide to meander inside of the footprint and find that there are various stations inside just as surprising as the elaborate marketing idea that takes over the outside of the footprint. They automatically jump on the opportunity to win some prizes by trading their emails for a chance to play a game. At the time, they don’t realize that they’ll be intrigued by the smart emails sent to them and think they’ll just brush them off – but they’ll realize they’re about to become loyal consumers in due time.

Back to the footprint – Josh and his friends finish playing the game only to realize that their phones are already running out of battery. Since they want to record videos of their favorite bands and take multiple pictures of the day, they decide to spend some more time in the footprint, which allows them to charge their phones for free.

While their phones are plugged in, they decide that they might as well take some really cool pictures at the GIF station. Thinking about how jealous their friends are going to be when they see how much fun they’re having at this music festival, they decide to share these GIFs directly from the event footprint, which also additionally allows them to be entered into another drawing for a prize related to the brand at hand.

Now that they’ve been having so much fun inside of this footprint, they realize that they want to spread the word. Since they received giveaways at the footprint, this will be easy. Everywhere that they walk in the festival grounds people ask them where they got their cool items because they’ve been seeing a lot of people sporting them around and now they want some too.

Josh and his friends didn’t miss anything that they planned to see and were extremely happy that they got the chance to see such an exciting side of a brand that they had heard of but weren’t necessarily all that familiar with. Now that they have had such a positive experience with said brand, they have decided to see what they’re all about.

When they’re leaving the festival, they all agree to look at the brand and all consequently realize that they already downloaded the mobile app needed to be a consumer at the footprint without even realizing it. Happy that they don’t have to use any of their data, they become an even bigger fan of the brand and decide to tell even more friends about their great experience with the brand.

As Josh goes to bed that night he’s more than satisfied with the experience that a random brand has been able to provide him with and now he’s more than happy that he knows the difference between that brand and their competition.