Grassroots Marketing and Live Event Strategies for Brands   

For the past 13 years 4EON has been helping global brands like Oakley, Ray-Ban, Prada, Chanel, and many others to connect with their target consumers and audiences in locations where they can have personal hands on experience with the brand, its products and or services. If you are a brand, use grassroots marketing to cut through the advertising clutter with creative and sometimes shocking approaches.    

4EON’s marketing services include event planning, consumer activation, promotional tours, experiential campaigns, public relations, creative design, guerilla marketing, product sampling, street graphic graffiti, street teams, and brand sponsorship.  4EON creates strategies that cover discovering local grassroots and event opportunities, establishing budgets, planning, staffing, brand ambassadors, execution, post event evaluations.  

Prior to launching a product, brands are seeing results and choosing to invest marketing budgets in local experiential grassroots marketing campaigns, which embrace and compliment event location based marketing efforts.  These marketing strategies working together to bring potential consumers face to face with a brand’s product to create a real connection and lasting impression.

How Does Grassroots marketing work for a brand?     

Companies want to build a base of loyal customers who share and promote their products. Guerilla marketing can sometimes help to spark community interest in a brand by instigating curiosity with a non traditional marketing tactics.  Establishing location based experiences which could be in-store demonstration events, mall tours, pop up stores, and road shows can build strong lasting relationships.  Grassroots marketing can be a win win for both companies and the community because the brand can be considered a valuable resource which they can align their business objectives with the peoples needs. Grassroots marketing can also be done online such as company posting ads in unexpected places, like YouTube, which is primarily known as a community of vibrant amateurs. It means targeting users who will engage with your product.  Event participants and community members are encouraged to do activities that create a buzz or ripple effect about your products, brands image, which in return the loyal customers are rewarded with product samplings and other benefits.  

Word Of Mouth

The basic idea and objective of a successful grassroots marketing, campaign is to saturate a community so that people are talking about a brand.   To do this effectively before an event you need to keep the brand name in front of peoples minds. The campaign message needs to be updated often so that people stay excited about it.  This can be done by marketing with a few different strategies and on different levels.   This can be sponsoring community teams, managing local events, sending out street teams to talk to people and try products, launching experiential events with product giveaways and bargains. ING Direct bank wanted to create some buzz and cut through the regular billboard advertising clutter so they came up with different type of marketing idea to get peoples attention.  They came up with a creative idea to give out free bus & train rides in the cities of Boston, San Francisco, and Washington D.C. Within these public transportation vehicles were strategically placed orange suited brand ambassadors who had promotional pamphlet materials to give out.  They even put banner ads on the outside of buses and inside subway cars. This guerrilla marketing campaign was successful, which generated a lot of attention and media coverage.

“The intent and goal of grassroots marketing is to create brand disciples and viral spread, through word-of-mouth and online” – Davide Bolis

Local Events

Participating in local events, projects, meetings will raise awareness about your company. All communities have local events that brands can sponsor and be a part of.   Get a booth at a local festival, sponsor an event like Coachella, donate to local cause or charity.   All communities have their own events, participating will bring exposure and create a buzz.  Social media plays role in getting the word out about an upcoming event, contests can a good get people interested in attending. Craft beers just recently used a similar tactic to break into the Los Angeles wholesale beer distributor marketplace in order to get their beer on shelves of Costco and Whole Foods.  They supplied kegs and became sponsors of sporting events and high profile charity functions. This was used to get name recognition and get people to try their product. They also went after the events that the distributors that they wanted to do business with were a sponsor of.  They would tell the distributor “can we give you a few kegs?”, which helped to show the distributor that they were willing to put money (in the form of free beer) behind their brand, and this made them more likely to work with them in the future. Never stop networking in business.

Graffiti Guerilla Marketing

Audi launched a campaign to spread the word and the benefits of “clean diesel fuel” and to promote their TDI diesel cars, using a graffiti, guerilla marketing tactic across the metropolitan areas of Chicago and New York City.  To play even more off of the “clean theme”, Audi employed artists that used cleaning agents instead of spray paint to graffiti into the sidewalk and walls “Diesel it’s No Longer a Dirty Word” messaging that dispels the myths about diesel being a dirty fuel or word..  This campaign was effective, attention grabbing and it generated the media and people talking about the Audi brand and their clean TDI diesel cars.

Product Giveaways & Sampling

Product sampling promotions, which means giving away some samples of your brands services or products can encourage people to spread the word about your company.   Sampling promotions have several different strategies and they can be tailored to suit many different types of industries.  This is a chance also for your company to give away a branded item like a T-shirt or a mug with your company logo on it.   

A biscuit company could cater and offer samples at an event or festival. A fashion, cosmetics company could hold an event, and giveaway make-up samples to the attendees. Another way is to let a consumer test a product and then give direct feedback on it.   

Local Partnerships

Local partnerships can help to keep a grassroots campaign going.  Go in with another company and together fund and sponsor an event. Having brand ambassadors that can articulate your products talking points effectively, generate excitement and positive impressions will be a critical factor in the success of any consumer activation campaign.       

4EON’s Grassroots Marketing campaigns include:   

• Experiential event marketing
• Guerilla marketing
• Tradeshows & conferences  
• In-store demonstrations
• Consumer activation
• Street Teams
• Event photo activation   
• Mobile marketing tours   
• Sampling promotions   
• Product launches    
• Car simulators & scooter brigades  
• Video Production

Consumer Engagement Experts

4EON’s non-traditional experiential marketing campaigns put brands right into consumers worlds by developing immersive event experiences that make consumers want to take part in, to get a personalized brand interaction.       

Our 13 years of experience producing a wide variety of experiential and grassroots marketing activations-from road shows to mall tours to pop up stores to product launches to media events- throughout the US and internationally.

Contact us to get started about how we help your brand grow.