Experiential Marketing
The first time I used the term "Experiential Marketing" I didn't know it was already term, but it seemed to fit what I was trying to sum up into one concept: "A way for customers to engage and interact with brands, products, and services in sensory ways." That is now the site description of the Experiential Marketing Forum. I'm not even sure how long that site has been around, but I don't remember seeing it two years ago when I was first exploring this concept while co-founding a start-up.
Taking a cursory glance at the Google search results for "Experiential Marketing," I get:
Experiential marketing allows customers to engage and interact with brands, products, and services in sensory ways that provide the icing on the cake of... Experiential Marketing Forum
If the success of traditional event and experiential marketing is shared with LIM then it could indicate quite a lucrative and fairly low-cost means of product... Wikipedia
Experiential marketing is a method for creating an emotional and rational response from consumers. Most experiential marketing... wiseGEEK
Experiential marketing, a decidedly turn-of-the-millennium form of corporate persuasion that strives to elicit a powerful sensory or cognitive consumer response, ... Amazon.com
Experiential marketing has tremendous power to fuel your brand's overall marketing strategy. We create unique encounters that engage all the senses, and... MKG
From these first hits on Google, it seems pretty obvious that experiential marketing is a relatively new concept, or at least an old idea in a new package. It's typically event-focused advertising that engages a potential customer through multiple senses.
This type of marketing really excites me because it engages your senses and has the potential to really grab your attention. Video clip ads, billboards, display ads, etc. are all great, but they aren't fun. They aren't engaging. They're passive advertising. I think experiential marketing has a lot of potential to hit you on a deeper level.