What is Brand Activation?
Brand activation refers to a campaign, event, or interaction through which your brand generates awareness and builds lasting connections with your target audience. Most brand activations are interactive, allowing audiences to engage directly with a brand and its products.
The definition of brand activation is often misconstrued or confused with more general branding strategies. The confusion is understandable: building awareness and connecting to an audience is indeed the focus of most branding and marketing initiatives.
But, brand activation refers to a specific campaign or event, an isolated experience with the singular purpose of elevating your brand — rather than the general, ongoing process of branding.
Why is brand activation important?
Imagine your company just launched yesterday. You know your target audience, but they don’t know you — and the few who are aware of your brand don’t have any meaningful connection to it. In order to get your brand off the ground, you need to make a splash. You need to generate engagement. You need to give your audience a reason to be excited about your company. In short, you need to activate your brand.
Brand activations are one-off, in-person events, experiences, and interactions that forge lasting emotional connections between a brand and their target audience (source).
A brand activation will jolt your brand to life, garner attention from new audiences, and redefine how your existing audience perceives you. And with the right approach, brand activations can be remarkably effective — 98% of people feel more inclined to purchase a brand’s products after attending an activation.
Activate Your Brand to Activate Your Audience.
Brand activations are about coming to your audience and letting them know in a memorable way who you are and why they should support you. Ideally, it generates enthusiasm beyond the moment and leads to action on behalf of your consumers. It’s a matter of reaching the right audience in the right moment in a way that speaks to them.