Hi there, this is Zsuzsa Kecsmar, 
CMO and Co-founder of Antavo. 
And I’m here with Bernd Schmitt, who is 
a professor at the Columbia Business School, 
and also the inventor of the term: 
experiential marketing. 
Yeah, good to be here! 
I’m glad that you are here.  
Please tell me more about when was the time 
when you thought about experiential marketing, 
and how you came up with the term. 
It’s so widely used all over the world now, 
and we also use it. 
I started it in 1999. I wrote a book 
called “Experiential Marketing”. 
In retrospect I should have called it 
“Experience Marketing”, 
because some people don’t know 
how to spell ‘experiential’. 
So I’ve got all sorts of comments from 
all around the world, like: 
“Oh, I really love your experimental marketing’, 
and I always had to correct them. 
But what it is of course? It’s the idea that 
marketing should be very very much concerned 
about the experiences of the customers. 
Customers can be B2B customers 
or they can be of course end consumers. 
And what do you think, what 
makes great customer experience? 
Well, there are lots of different 
aspects to a great customer experience. 
First of all, if you think of terms of touchpoints, 
there are always numerous contacts 
or touchpoints with customers companies have. 
There’s the product, there’s the online presence, 
there’s the mobile platform, 
there’s social media, there’s packaging, 
communication. All sorts of communication. 
So one aspect, is of course of a great 
customer experience is to make sure 
that each one of those touchpoints 
deliver a great experience. 
So that the product is right, the communications 
are right, the packaging is right and so on. 
And also that it’s unified, right? 
That was the second point I wanted to get to. 
That it’s unified, right? 
I mean you have all these individual points and 
you’ve been doing a great job on each one of them 
but you may not be speaking with the 
same voice or have a unified experience. 
And that is actually much more challenging. 
Because it requires technology to bring things together. 
It requires also an understanding of 
what the experience overall should be. 
Not just what is great customer service and 
what is a great app, right? 
So it’s really about this integration. 
And if you think how the organisation 
is built up within the company 
especially a larger company, 
there’s the digital team, there’s the ecommerce team,
there’s the one working on offline, 
there’s the social media team. 
And oftentimes they work in their own world, their 
own team. So it’s a management challenge too! 
Correct! As a huge management challenge, 
because many companies have silos. 
There are the certain phenomena, 
like “No, we didn’t do that, it’s not invented here. 
And then they don’t want to collaborate 
with another team in the organisation. 
It’s always so hard, right? 
Absolutely. And there’s also very very often 
outsiders getting involved, right?
They’re consultants, they’re the agencies, 
so you also need to communicate what 
you want as an experience to them. 
So the integration, even though 
it’s a simple, simple idea, 
it’s very difficult to do from an organisation perspective. 
What we often tell to our clients, or basically 
anyone who asks about customer loyalty 
is that it’s important to engage the customer 
not only when they would buy, 
but also outside of the buying cycle. 
Oh absolutely, that’s a major 
finding actually in marketing. 
It’s important to not just to get a new customer 
but also keep that customer for a lifetime, ideally. 
Because it’s much easier 
to serve a loyal customer. 
A loyal customers are often less price sensitive, right?
A loyal customer of course 
gives you a lot of positive word of mouth 
that can be face to face as it was in the old days. 
And nowadays it’s a matter of likes 
and promoting your products and services. 
So these are two major things 
in terms of a great customer experience. 
To deliver on each one of the 
touchpoints and contact points, 
and to provide the integration and 
do that from an organisational perspective. 
But I think there’s a third one too. I don’t want to 
lose that idea: you need to be innovative. 
I mean technology changes all the time. 
The world changes all the time. 
Customer preferences change all the time. So you 
always need to think of what is the next step? 
How can I improve the customer experience? 
How can I upgrade it, make it better? 
How can I make it more current?
How can I always be relevant for 
customers and their lifestyles? 
You know what? I think we are very lucky 
because we talk to so many companies who are 
innovative, because they are talking with us. 
So maybe I see a view, which is biased, because 
those who we are talking to, they are innovative. 
And I was wondering, what do you think, what 
is the source of innovation within companies? 
Why can some companies innovate, 
and why some others cannot? 
Well, it seems to me that every company after a 
while would like to do things the way they are. 
You know, they are successful, why change things? 
Why shake things up? 
In the beginning , of course,
when you’re an entrepreneur, 
you’re starting a new business, you 
experiment all the time. 
But after a while you have
a lot of organisational structures 
that prevent people from trying out new things. And 
also, literally your own success can become a liability. 
The key thing is that you have a leadership team 
and the CEO or the leader of the company, 
that really always says: 
"Look, the fact that we are successful  now doesn’t 
mean we’ll be successful in the future." 
Also, produces projects that are constantly 
about understanding customers, 
knowing what technology might be on the horizon, 
in order to create a better customer experience. 
It’s a matter of being constantly on the watch of 
what’s going on on the outside, 
with customers, and also with competition, frankly. 
Benchmarking is very very important. 
And not only within the industry. 
Because you know what?
The industry may go away!
Sometimes a new technology takes over 
an old technology. Kills entire industries. 
The thing of film rather than digital devices. 
It’s a matter of what I like to call 
‘outside industry benchmarking’. 
Getting great ideas from other industries. 
Can you tell me an example what 
makes customer loyalty, in a way, that 
what are the campaigns you’ve seen during 
your work, or during the brands that you follow, 
that are great in providing a great customer 
experience. So they can build customer loyalty. 
Well, a great customer experience, as I’ve said, 
has to do with different touchpoints done well, 
and then the integration, and also the innovation. 
There are some companies everybody thinks of, 
like Apple is always coming up. 
But there are some other companies 
that have entirely revamped themselves. 
Like you have seen this with 
some luxury companies. 
I mean Burberry has done a very 
nice job revamping its brand. 
It was very starchy, it was very old-fashioned, 
but they’ve focused on 
one particular aspect of their brand, which in this 
actually, it's fashion business, is a particular pattern. 
So they made that pattern in a very innovative way, 
the center of their company. 
You can see that’s all over their competition, 
that they’re trying to get that too.
And also they did a great job 
in integration, as a matter of fact, right?
In terms of not just looking in 
this case at the pattern and the design, 
but also looking at, well, “What should our
retail presence look like”
and also  what new technologies can 
be used through social media. 
For example, I once bought a Burberry piece 
two or three years ago, 
but I’m still getting, constantly, really interesting 
communications from them through social media. 
Where they inform me about the new trends and 
the new products they take onto the market. 
So you can find, frankly speaking, great 
experiences at lots of businesses. 
Amazon, in a way, provides a great experience 
for people that really wanted to be convenient, 
and want them to have a lot of 
knowledge and information about them. 
So you can have a great experience 
in fashion, in luxury. 
You can have it in online retail, you could 
call it the ‘Amazon Business’. 
You can have it of course in consumer electronics, 
and smartphones and computing devices, like Apple. 
Okay, thank you for all these very smart insights, 
I really hope this was useful for you, 
as much as it was useful for me. 
If you wanted more information on customer 
experience, experiential marketing, 
please head over to our blog. 
If you wanted, sign up to our newsletter. 
Thank you for watching, see you next time! 
Bye! 
