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: Some people confuse experiential marketing with field marketing. Field marketing involves traditional face-to-face promotional and sales promotion tactics. Field marketing activities usually involve the use of promotional staff on a tactical basis. The promotional staff are deployed to distribute leaflets, samples, merchandise displays and in-store promotions, audit compliance of promotions (as communicated by regular store staff), mystery shop and capture data. Large portions of these services are part of sales promotion, which is why, typically, field marketing budgets are taken from the sales budgets and not from the marketing budget. The distribution of samples or leaflets is not two-way and interactive. It does not create a brand-relevant interactive and engaging experience; therefore, it is not in its own right experiential marketing.

There is also the mistaken belief that experiential marketing is interchangeable with event marketing. The simplest way to see it is that field marketing is normally the application of field staff to support sales promotions, market research or advertising. Events are face-to-face meetings that can be, but are not exclusively experiential in nature, while experiential marketing is a methodology that utilises a live brand experience (involving either face-to-face or remote two-way communication) at its core, and then amplifies that ‘big idea’ with a selection of communications that are integrated to promote the two-way communication concept. It brings brand personalities to life, creating sensory experiences that engage consumers through two-way communications that involve input from the consumer. The benefits that can be gained from the effective execution of experiential marketing campaigns are different to the benefits of a field marketing activity.

Field marketing is appropriate and effective in supporting existing promotions or activities. For example, if you had a two-for-one offer on a drink and you felt that the offer needed additional reinforcement, then maybe it would be valuable to position promotional staff near the point of sale, encouraging consumers to purchase the product or giving out samples. Or, if you had recently established a new distribution channel in a major supermarket and part of this contract gives your products a top-shelf position and a poster displayed in the window, you might find it useful to have field marketing staff visiting these supermarkets and auditing, to check that the supermarkets comply with the agreement. The potential benefits of experiential marketing are broader than the traditional objectives that are affiliated with most marketing communication approaches.