45 | IRL LOL

Friend-of-the-letter and co-author Damian and I did our first Amsterdam event for Not a Playbook a few weeks ago at the NIO House in Amsterdam. As avid, consistent readers of this letter, you’ll recognize that name (of course) as the bricks-and-mortar representation of the Chinese EV brand’s experiential strategy as it looks to find a foothold in Europe. If not, the refresher is here. But don’t click yet. Read on.

One of the final questions from the lovely crowd of creatives, strategists, and founders was around our “bullshit detectors” and how we deploy that in our work in the brand space. I mumbled something about reading a lot and listening to a podcasts (Honestly, I thought the question was aimed at Damian). But I landed, finally, on my early career as a journalist, tilting at the windmills of political and corporate power, and how I use that skepticism in my work these days, well … building windmills.

I still like hearing journalists talking skeptically about branding and marketing. A few weeks ago, three Business of Fashion reporters spent an episode dissecting the value of experiential branding when it comes to building a brand’s personality and reputation. The topic was stores as “third places”, the term popularized by sociologist Ray Oldenburg in advocating for places beyond the office and the home where people could gather.

Brands have used retail in this spirit (if not definition) for decades, but have ramped up the experience part of it more recently, offering coffee, ice cream, and other (monetizable) gestures to get people to linger. The marketing world is all about it right now, because Zuckerberg, et al has made it impossible to build these universes — the algorithm chopping up your messaging and distributing it at will in peoples’ feeds.

Apple’s visionary retail leader Angela Ahrendts borrowed this term in transforming the Apple Store into a place of learning, collaboration and creativity with the Today at Apple program she conceived and launched in 2017. The idea of those gleaming luxury temples turning into community centers of sorts might have seemed laughable at the time.

But as Today at Apple rolled out in Apple Stores around the world, and people signed up for iPhone photo walks, sessions on recording podcasts in Garage band, or exploring color theory in ProCreate on iPad with local artists, the tune changed.

The sessions were free. You could sign up ahead of time, or just wander it and sit on one of the (uncomfortable) Jonny Ives-designed box seats arrayed around the newly-installed video walls. We watched participants in Apple stores around the world upload their session work to social media under the #todayatapple hashtag.

But was it a Third Place? Not really. The low hum of commerce toned industriously in the background, and that Apple Store environment — to me at least —is less about relaxing into a brand than it is about sitting up a bit straighter or making a show of being an existing customer.

“In my reporting, there was one statistic that was repeated over and over again, is that for every minute increased, there was like a 1.6% increase on sales likelihood or something,” said retail editor Cat Chen. “The source of it was from a very, very old study. And so I didn’t include it in the story because I was like, everybody is citing this. And so it makes sense that dwell time would increase sales conversion, but quantifying it, I think, is still very, very difficult.”

So if you’re an industrious marketing manager who — like Cat Chen — doesn’t want to rely on a tired old statistical framework, how do you measure this? We used net promoter scores (NPS) for Today at Apple, and that kept the bean counters at bay for quite some time. Also, truth be told, Apple’s great credit as a pioneer in this space is seeing the true value of long-term brand love, not the short-term conversion of a TAA participant into an iPhone 17 purchaser.

But there are a growing number of initiatives that aim to better measure the value of an experience, both in stores and in the sort of pop-ups brands turn to increasingly to “connect” with folks.

💡 A group of clever agencies in New York came up with Return on Experience Framework that advocates a more nuanced, phased approach, instead of treating experiences like a media plan. They then get specific: looking at brand awareness, audience engagement, sales, and PR buzz as separate parts of a whole. You can check out the report here. It’s useful to those of us in the game.

Those pop-ups have more license to experiment. They tend to be tied to marketing budgets and bring different expectations than the fast conversion demanded in social campaigns. The arguments made internally are less metric-driven, than behavior-driven. This, after all, is the most valuable touchpoint for a brand’s personality, the place where your creative world can lodge itself into the psyche of the customer.

And thus, reader — at last — we come to a recent example of this sort of brand universe showcase. I don’t have access to the data pre, during, and post of this brand coming up. But maybe I can focus on their intention, and the work it did to reaffirm their message.

Tony’s Chocoloneley 🍫 Born and raised in Amsterdam, Tony’s is a bi-polar swirl of goofy visual identity and strident cocoa-farmer advocacy wrapped in a delicious bar of chocolate. In the consumer packaged goods category, they’re known as purpose-driven, and for walking the talk in rehauling the deeply problematic cocoa supply chain. Tony’s overpays its cocoa farmers in West Africa to elevate living standards, diligently separates its source beans from those going to Nestle and other behemoths, and does its best to keep children from the back-breaking task of cocoa cultivation. How do I know this? Their strap lines include “slave-free chocolate” and their web site offers all sorts of ways to dig into this matter (Tell me you’re a brand started by journalists without telling me you’re a brand started by journalists). So, the preamble done, let’s get to the main event. Over the course of eight days, Tony’s took over one of the big spaces in a redeveloped public tram storage facility in Amsterdam called De Hallen. They set up a maze of an experience inside with interactive carnivalesque stations interspersed with facts about the global cocoa trade, Tony’s work in getting other companies (like Ben & Jerry’s and Feastables) to partake in its Open Chain initiative, and black and white imagery of cocoa farmers. Kids could frolic in a ball pit, but they could also try and lug 60kg of beans around the way children in Ghana and the Ivory Coast are forced to, in order to earn money for their families.

Now there’s a delicate balance Tony’s strives to maintain. The Germans might call it Zuckerbrot und Peitsche (sugar bread and the whip): How to build a brand world that bolsters their admirable intentions without alienating those who are just in it for a delicious bite of chocolate (or those ready to scream “green-washing”). That’s the kind of message that’s incredibly hard to bring to a social media audience.

So the angle is in the earned media of reputable publications writing about their work, and showing up in environments they can control. The elevated science fair they presented in their eye-watering shades of red and blue struck this balance nicely. The Peitsche felt real because Tony’s has been banging the drum on this very topic for 20 years. But Tony’s coworkers were as engaging and fun as their playful brand pillars. And families left happy, and with a bar of their as-yet unreleased Everything Chocolate. That should definitely be released, by the way. And soon.