A reminder from Paris Fashion Week: Experiential marketing matters
This past week, Paris showed us just how powerful experiential marketing (AKA - live events) can be. This season’s shows were more creative and clever than ever. We begin with a few highlights from fashion’s favorite Instagram darling @stylenotcom and then break down how these well crafted shows and presentations can be used as an experiential template.
First, on Acne’s very pink runway, guests were seated on silk beds and there was a live musical performance while models whizzed by.
Next, legendary French shoe brand Roger Vivier hosted “La Maison Vivier”, showing their new collection. But they also had shoemakers onsite for a (first ever) public viewing of the making of their iconic shoes - très experiential.
Then there was sand falling from the sky at Courreges as models walked through the faux desert.
Finally we got our pièce de résistance when Bella Hadid closed the Coperni show. If you have yet to hear about the stunt that took place on this runway, here’s what went down…Bella walked onto the runway wearing only a thong and her hand covering her chest. Two scientists then sprayed her body with Fabrican, an instant spray-on fabric. Once the airbrush was finished, a woman cut a slit in her now fully-formed dress and she struts the runway. It was completely mesmerizing and perfectly performed.
Before industries like entertainment and tech were coming up with creative IRL ways to drive buzz, fashion was using their runways to do just that. By definition, experiential marketing brings brands to life through unique, immersive experiences. Groundbreaking, engaging runway shows can give brands the holy grail of marketing. How might you take inspiration from fashion and apply it to your own strategy? Coperni absolutely nailed Paris Fashion Week, so we’re looking to them as a template for success:
The show becomes the brand platform and the brand controls the narrative.
The DNA of this brand has always been about the marriage of science and craft. The founders continue to innovate season after season and use new materials to push the envelope of fashion. The live spray of Hadid was a clever, physical personification of what the brand stands for.
Coperni set the scene perfectly with a clinical looking stage and amber colored glass bottles sitting on a sterile looking cart. That paired with Hadid –who is the embodiment of fashion– and the final styling of the dress post-spray by the head of design at Coperni, gave the audience so much drama before the dress even walked the runway. These are the seeds of a narrative that speaks loudly to the brand DNA of science and craft. Every press item following the stunt included these details in their coverage, showing that the narrative was all perfectly seeded by Coperni.
Ask yourself: what is your brand narrative? How might you tell a story about it in a new, exciting, or fresh way? What could be your spray-on dress moment?
The content that comes from the show feeds all other platforms; owned channels, partner channels and press coverage.
It’s been just days since the Coperni show and if you go to their own website, the current hero content is the SS23 Collection. Their social media channels, the same. The web, jam packed with worldwide search content of the Hadid stunt. The brand will probably eventually flow back into the current collection on their channels that they showed last season that will then catch up to the just shown. The backbone of their social media content comes from their runway shows. But for now, the brand capitalizes on all things SS23.
Similarly, Coperni has a number of famous faces that are fans of the brand. Let’s take Kylie Jenner who Coperni has made many pieces for. They dressed her for the show, she sat front row at their show, she documented herself wearing their clothes and accessories that day including multiple posts on her IG grid. The show gave their partners, Kylie and others, a reason to show off the brand to millions of followers.
And we can’t forget traditional press coverage. The widespread press coverage that Coperni got from the nine minutes of Bella is invaluable. If you did not know the brand Coperni previously, chances are you now do. And like so many, you probably were curious enough to go beyond the spray runway footage and actually see what the Coperni Collection looks like. The wide net cast from a stunt that goes viral leads to ROI. It introduces a much broader audience to their brand, beyond a tuned-in fashion crowd; it brings them to the mainstream.
Ask yourself: What IRL experiences can you pull to your digital platforms? How might you position it to your partners, or pitch it to the press? What are you doing offline that everyone online needs to know about?
The Community Building Byproduct
There is a magic to being in “the room where it happened” that turns enthusiastic bystanders into brand evangelists. While a majority of ROI in experiential these days comes from digital results, a truly successful experiential campaign does also leave the IRL crowd feeling a deep connection to the brand.
On the Soho House blog (which is a surprisingly fun little pocket of the internet), Billie Bhatia wrote a dispatch from Paris Fashion Week and her take from ground level on the Coperni stunt. She noted that it “Captured a hungry fashion week audience for a solid 15 minutes (miraculous in itself), and days after the event continued to be the ‘OMG, were you there?’ moment around the French capital.” Captivating the seen-it-all fashion crowd, well that is achieving the near impossible.
Ask yourself: Is there a way to bring my brand community together? What could I offer them that they wouldn’t experience anywhere else? Or what unique value add can I offer that would get all my fans into the same room?
This framework can be applied across industries when setting goals for your brand’s experiential strategy. If done well, experiential can and should be a key part of the foundation for your digital strategy. And if you need a north star, just remember Bella breaking the internet on the beloved Coperni runway. Now if only all of us could come up with a stunt like that…