MAM
Integrated communication key to experiential marketing: Dr Schmitt
NEW DELHI: Integrated Communication is a key to experiential marketing, says marketing guru and professor Dr. Bernd Schmitt.
Defining experiential marketing as a tool for the success of a brand Dr. Schmitt explained the need to create a holistic experience for a customer.
The professor of business at Columbia Business School, New York, on Experiential Marketing spoke in Delhi on 17 July during an interactive session organised by CNBC TV18.
Elaborating on the success of a brand through experiential Marketing, Dr. Schmitt illustrated an example of New BEETLE, a famous car for its unusual shape and colours.
“Colour and the unusual shape is the differentiating factor making this car a success in US market. It offered much more to a customer than just quality engine and other usual features. The brand associated itself with lifestyles of its consumers,” Dr. Schmitt said.
Dr Schmitt is one of the most creative and original business thinkers today. Known globally as a brilliant speaker, consultant, provocateur and iconoclast, Dr. Schmitt is transforming the business world’s understanding of strategy, creativity and innovation. Dr. Schmitt is also the executive director of the Center on Global Brand Leadership, the leading global forum on branding issues for researchers and executives.
As a consultant and CEO of The EX Group, Dr. Schmitt has worked with companies worldwide, including Sony, Ford, Philip Morris, and Procter & Gamble. He has given seminars to thousands of executives in more than 30 countries on the topic of customer experience.
Stating another successful example of managing customer experience, Dr. Schmitt explained how Singapore Airlines provides the brand experience by managing all contact points between the product and the customers. The key to successful marketing, according to him, is to become relevant to the customer at all times, understand his lifestyle and then develop the product.
Elaborating on the need of experiential marketing Dr. Schmitt stressed that marketing managers are product oriented and do not focus on customer experience with the product. “Highlighting product is not the right process, customer relevance is the key,” he said. Explaining further, Dr. Schmitt suggested that a company should adapt research techniques by closely observing and understanding the consumer behaviour and then developing the brand befitting the customer’s lifestyle.
Reiterating upon the method of broad base positioning and value deliverables, Dr. Schmitt suggested five comprehensive steps to Customer Experiential Marketing:
* Analysing the experiential world of the customer
* Building the experiential platform
* Designing the brand experience
* Structuring the customer interface
* Engaging in continuous innovation
Answering the question on ‘How would advertising fit into Experiential Marketing’, Dr. Schmitt said that advertising should focus on consumption situation where a consumer is using a product. Advertisers should follow the problem solution approach.
“In India, advertising is image driven. Advertisers usually demonstrate how a product works. The right approach is to show a demonstration which can be functional and experiential,” the guru advised.
Concluding his presentation Dr. Schmitt said that advertising and public relations should be involved at the stage of developing the product and there is a need to integrate all the channels of communication to create a holistic experience for the consumer. “Customer Experiential Marketing is not about fooling a customer or offering them superficial things, it is about the essence of customer desire”.
The biggest conversations in entertainment usually revolve around scale. Bigger launches, bigger stars, bigger production budgets, bigger platform strategies. Yet one of the clearest signs of market maturity shows up somewhere much smaller. It’s in the words they use every day: title cards, app menus, summaries, promotional descriptions, and push notifications. If all content sounds the same, the line blurs before they even click play.
It’s becoming more apparent as global platforms compete against regional ones in a world that’s increasingly multilingual and mobile-first. A team can spend hours crafting a content slate, but then rush to get the announcing copy out to the world. In a frenzied world like that, a grammar checker can be a lifeline in weeding out bad writing, awkward structure, and unwanted mistakes in content that’s going to be displayed on platforms, banners, and notifications.
The era of generic entertainment language
A strange sameness has crept into digital entertainment. Too many shows are described with the same flat phrases. Too many thrillers are called gripping. Too many dramas are labeled emotional. Too many reality formats are described as exciting journeys. The words may be completely right, yet they don’t stick in the reader’s mind.
It’s crucial to keep in mind that individuals take in material at an unprecedented rate. They are not meeting content through a critic’s essay or a full trailer every time. Often they meet it through a few words on a screen. Those words are doing more work than many teams admit.
Words have become a part of the user experience in a cluttered streaming world. They set the mood, build anticipation, help people make choices, and show them if something fits with their way of thinking, their style, or their daily life. If the writing isn’t very good, the platform itself can start to feel like it’s not very good.
That is a bigger issue than simple copy fatigue. If every title is presented in the same voice, brands begin to blur together. The audience may still watch, but the platform stops building a distinct editorial identity.
Why platform voice now matters more than ever
Entertainment companies used to rely heavily on channel identity, release schedules, or star power to define themselves. Those signals still matter, though the digital environment has changed how users experience them. A streaming app is a living product. People move through it quickly, often alone, often late at night, often half-distracted. They encounter dozens of pieces of micro-copy in a single session.
That makes voice consistency more important than many product teams expect.
A platform that sounds sharp, clear, and culturally aware feels more premium. A platform that sounds overproduced, vague, or repetitive feels less alive. This is especially true in markets where viewers move easily between local television, global streaming, short video, sports, and social media. The standard for attention is high, and bland wording rarely survives first contact.
The strongest media brands tend to understand a subtle truth. Good copy is not only about selling a show. It is about shaping the personality of the service itself.
This happens through many small choices:
● how drama is framed versus comedy
● whether youth content sounds natural or forced
● whether mobile notifications feel urgent or annoying
● whether homepage descriptions carry rhythm or read like database entries
● whether language changes intelligently across regions and devices
These details may seem minor in isolation. Together, they define how a platform feels.
The cost of speed in modern content operations
One reason entertainment language becomes repetitive is simple pressure. Media teams are under constant demand to move faster. There’s more content to create, more spaces to fill, more regions to cater to, and more forms to accommodate. What once might have been a single piece of copy can become a complex network of related content within app stores, smart TV interfaces, social media, push notifications, email marketing, and ad-supported spaces.
Under that pressure, safe language becomes tempting.
Safe language is quick. It passes review. It offends no one. It can be reused across genres with minor edits. The problem is that safe language is often forgettable. It tells viewers what category a title belongs to, yet does little to communicate why anyone should care.
This is where media teams face a real strategic choice. They can keep treating copy as a production step, or they can see it as part of audience experience design.
That second view changes the workflow. It encourages stronger editorial direction, clearer brand vocabulary, and tighter review processes. It also creates room for experimentation. A show summary does not need to sound like a press release. A release alert does not need to sound like a machine-generated reminder. There is space for specificity, texture, and voice, even within short-form platform language.
Multilingual markets reveal the problem faster
This is especially the case in a market where there are a variety of languages and a complex identity for the audiences. A text that reads well in one language can sound clunky in another. A translation can preserve meaning while losing energy. A tagline built for desktop can fall apart on mobile. A youth-oriented campaign may become overly formal when localized too literally.
That is why the best media writing in multilingual environments depends on adaptation rather than simple conversion.
The goal is to preserve intent, tone, and audience fit across versions. That takes editorial judgment. It requires people who understand how entertainment language behaves in real life, not only in style guides.
Some of the most common problems appear in places audiences notice immediately:
● subtitles that are grammatically fine but emotionally flat
● app descriptions that sound translated rather than written
● genre labels that fail to reflect local viewing habits
● promotions that use the same vocabulary across very different titles
When these weaknesses accumulate, viewers may not consciously analyze them. They simply sense that the platform feels distant or mechanical.
The hidden power of better wording
There is a reason sharp writing continues to matter even in a highly visual medium. Before viewers commit time, language gives them a frame. It tells them what kind of experience awaits. It reduces uncertainty. It can even create an appetite.
This is valuable, and it is valuable in a somewhat nebulous way. Well-crafted text can increase click-through rates, reduce bounce rates, increase trust, and facilitate the spread of content across discovery surfaces. It can also be useful for the spread of advertisements by making the overall platform feel more refined.
But the real value is in the culture. Entertainment organizations want to be modern. They want to know how people feel. They want to be able to state that they live in the same place. That is very hard to achieve through templates alone.
The platforms most likely to stand out over time may be the ones that invest more seriously in their editorial layer. They will care about sentence flow in metadata, tone in alerts, nuance in translation, and clarity in every line that appears before the content starts. They will treat words as part of content packaging, product design, and brand building all at once.
In a business obsessed with scale, this may seem like a small idea. It is not. When streaming platforms start sounding the same, language becomes one of the few tools left to restore distinction. A sharper voice can make a familiar interface feel more thoughtful. A better sentence can rescue a title from invisibility. A more human line can remind the audience that somebody on the other side still understands how people actually choose what to watch.
