Brand activation is an aspect of marketing and it is a pretty new term in the industry. It simply refers to the process of getting consumers active using brand interaction. This just means making your brand exposed to the public, creating brand awareness and interaction between customers and the company through brand experience. It just basically is the process of promoting and maintaining a company’s brand.

For instance, for a new company just starting, a whole lot of people don’t know about your business or what your brand is about, your brand is basically dead and would need some kind of activation before it is useful. Brand activation doesn’t just work for businesses that are just starting. If a business wants to do some sort of rebranding and make a few touches to their company’s outlook, it wouldn’t just be easy to make the changes and expect customers to notice, it needs to pass through the process of turning people’s minds over to the new brand changes and creating awareness for it.

To make it easier, the major aim of this kind of campaign is to get consumers and customers active. It is majorly about jolting brands back to life by forming long-term personal connections with their consumers Brand activation rally takes different shapes and also includes Marketing based on experiences, generally known as experiential marketing, sampling campaigns, Digital rally, consumer promotions, shopper marketing, and many others.

Brand Activation in Kenya

Kenya is an East African country growing rapidly in the business world. It is said to have the most advanced and largest economy in east Africa. With the rapid growth of Kenya’s economy, it has become a good place for businesses to thrive. Businesses look for places where they could set up and grow significantly. Kenya has proven a fertile soil where every company in Africa and even internationally wants to set up businesses but then, with so many businesses looking to set up branches in Kenya, how do you make yours stand out?

In the year 2018, an alcohol brand we all know, Smirnoff unveiled a Kenyan campaign which they called the #smirnoffmixexperience. This campaign involved getting brand ambassadors, and musicians to engage customers in different countries and make them aware of the brand. This is called consumer promotion. They used this strategy to create awareness for their products. For a new company that is just setting up base in Kenya, your business is basically dead until you do something to jolt it to life.

Let’s take, for instance, a well-known brand in Nigeria hoping to set up a branch in Kenya, how possible do you think it would be to get Kenyans to know that your business is around in their state if you haven’t done anything to create awareness? And do you think they would trust your brand and patronize you? When do they probably have a whole lot of other products they were using before you came? This is where brand activation comes in, with the use of techniques like sampling campaigns, consumer promotion and digital marketing, that is if you’re dealing with customers that are internet savvy but the consumers not in sync with modern technologies, sampling campaigns would go a long way to getting across and seizing the attention of your target audience. This is just a gradual process but with time and a good brand activation strategy you would get to gain the trust of your target audiences, which automatically means business success for you, for many years to come, provided you still make use of brand activation once in a while.

How Does Brand Activation Help Businesses?

When used properly, brand activation could help bring out real and very good results for your brand and your customer care as well. This helps keep the public enlightened on the new direction a company is planning on taking and also to stir up excitement in customers to have an experience of this new brand for themselves.

Brand activation has a lot of benefits for businesses and they are:

Brand activation helps strengthen the relationship between a company and its customers. It is usually not an easy thing to do, to get your customers to trust you and have faith in your brand but with proper brand activation, it is indeed very possible to do.
Brand activation helps in bringing the cost of marketing activities to the lowest. It forms a brand imprint. and this works by creating an imprint that makes your brand prominent to consumers who use a company’s product and even to those who haven’t used it?
It creates and improves the interaction between a brand and its consumers. For every relationship to work two-way communication is required. Brand activation helps creates this platform for businesses and their consumers.

They help to get opportunities on the market that suits brand involvement.

There are different kinds of Brand Activation Strategies and they include:

Digital marketing rally – Our world of today has become very digitized, every person is on the internet. This is the era where business thrives mostly through social media platforms. Digital activation plays a major role in getting a brand across to its target audiences.

Sampling Campaigns – Getting to give out samples of new brand products has been practiced for a long while now, it stands as one of the traditional strategies of brand activation. Giving out free samples of products is a good way of introducing a new product to the people. This helps kill two birds with one stone as you reach your target audience as well as get sound feedback from them.

Shopper marketing – This helps brands understand the relationship that exists between shoppers and consumers and also uses this insight to push for the consumption of the brand at retail.

Consumer promotion – These are methods and techniques put together to help businesses find new customers or give little rewards to the customers they have already. It is basically aimed at increasing the value of a brand’s product, by either cutting the cost or the regular price of products just to make consumers happy.

Experiential marketing – This is one of the most effective ways of kick-starting one’s brand.in most cases, it is referred to as Live or event marketing. It allows customers the opportunity to experience a brand by themselves.