I’ve taken a look at all of the Apple launch events in the past 10 years and I get it. Steve Jobs created a launch event formula and, surely, the results must have been satisfactory since Apple kept on reusing it for the last decade. This puzzles me, since doing things in the same way is the antidote of creativity.
Let’s think differently.
“Digital” is an umbrella term for communication channels that connect users. It is a term for everything that isn’t physical. Digital is not a term for technologies. Digital is not a term for only social media services. Right now, digital is a term under which things like cryptocurrencies, smartphones, social media apps, websites, augmented reality, streaming services, blockchain, chatbots, etc. go. What will be on this list in the future is irrelevant, since the list will evolve over time.
Digital today is lonely, passive and depressing. Various studies state that Americans spend approximately half of their day staring at different screens. The potential reach of digital is almost endless. However, digital, for the sake of digital, is a bad idea.
If we spend half our day looking at screens, it means we use the rest of the day in real life. The rest of the awake time we experience something that caters to our senses.
“Experiential” is another umbrella term which means communicating by creating an experience. Unlike advertising, the term experiential can’t be broken down into formatted executions—print, outdoor, radio, etc.
I have good news, almost anything can be made more experiential. A retail space, a shower, a business conference, a team meeting, an ad or a coffee mug. The only thing it takes is being obsessed with discovering something that will get under our skin.
Communicating by an experience is the most compelling way to shape what people want to want. Experience is the route to our unconscious thinking, the part of our brain where decisions are made. The potential reach of experiential is always limited. Thus, the future of experiential communication is to marry digital. The future of digital business communication is to become experiential—more bang for the digital currency!
Here’s a hypothetical example:
One day Apple will launch a brand-new product again. It has designed an engaging digital experience for their customers, not a passive live-stream (a halfhearted digital copy) of the event.
Then customers will have an opportunity to experience the product in real life. How does it look, feel, sound and work? Hopefully this “retail experience” will be more experiential in the future. It’s simple: Emotions drive sales.
One more thing—as the cherry on the top, yet another digital experience is given to the customers. Maybe it’s a hyper-tailored art installation that enables the customers to dive inside the new product and experience its beauty. This is digiperiential communication. It entails an ecosystem of digital and physical experiences. It will slowly become a more and more acknowledged way of communicating to internal and external customers in the coming years.
And, one day, it might take over.
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Timo Kiuru is a global creative director and the founder of a creative brand consultancy, The Unthinkable. He has written a free interactive book on experience marketing, and travels the world speaking to professional audiences. Kiuru was a member of the Connect Corporate 40 Under 40 in 2016.
