Experiential marketing
Experiential marketing, or Customer-Experience Marketing, is a kind of guerrilla marketing that connects the people to the product by experience (Philippine Business, 2008). As the secondary resources indicate, the crucial element of the Experiential marketing is to let the target audience interact with the product which enables them to get to know the product before the potential purchase.
Personal experiences help people connect to a brand and make intelligent and informed purchasing decisions. The term "Experiential marketing" refers to actual customer experiences with the brand/product/service that drive sales and increase brand image and awareness. (Hauser, 2008)
Experiential marketing is on Internet applied very often to those products that may be purchased and used by using computer. By offering trial version for free-of-charge usage of the product (mostly software or an Internet service) with no obligation for future purchase the marketers may achieve higher response from the target audience and increase of sales. Major software producers like Microsoft or Apple offer trial downloads of their product in exchange for contact information for further possibility of marketing communication. However, this type of marketing is not by its principles a guerrilla marketing campaign. However, the continuous development of new technologies for web design, especially so called Rich Internet Applications (RIA), enables web designers to built websites that increases the customer experience by untraditional way, as for example new micro website of Mercedes-Benz shows on its website of Mercedes limousine E-class available on The Mercedes-Benz website.
Example of Experiential marketing
Image 6 Resource: Mercedes-Benz International, 2009 visited on July 26, 2009