If you’re interested in learning how to incorporate experiential marketing into your marketing mix, you can’t go wrong with Shirra Smilansky’s Experiential Marketing.

Summary of Experiential Marketing

Smilansky’s book is a deep dive into the process of successful experiential marketing. She provides a detailed overview of what it is and what to do, from brainstorming an idea to implementing it. I believe this book would be an excellent textbook for a course on how to create and implement an experiential marketing campaign.

What I liked about Experiential Marketing

Smilansky left no stone unturned. She provides a detailed system for developing an experiential marketing campaign, vetting it and implementing it. She also emphasizes the importance of measuring results so you can make adjustments along the way and know whether or not your campaign made a difference.

Overall, the language was accessible and I believe most students of marketing could use this book with success.

What I didn’t like about Experiential Marketing

Frankly, this read like a textbook. Most of the examples are from the U.K., which, I suppose, makes sense since this book was written and published there. However, for my audience of primarily U.S. based work-at-home entrepreneurs, this book may not be an easy or enjoyable read. In fact, I totally could see them looking to someone like me to translate it into something a bit more accessible.

What I’d Love to See in the Third Edition

I would love to see checklists, forms and other downloadable support material provided with this book. That, or have an accompanying workbook available. This book explains the process, but when you actually want to go through it yourself, these downloads would be invaluable.

Conclusion

I actually enjoyed reading this book and it got my creative juices flowing. In fact, I plan on playing around with the processes in the book to create my marketing plan for Public Speaking Super Powers! Although most small business entrepreneurs may find that the projects used as examples are daunting due to their obviously larger budgets, I think you can translate what you learn from this book to a smaller scale. If you come prepared for a dryer read, then this book could get you excited about the possibilities of experiential marketing in your business.

Rating: 4 out of 5 Possible

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NOTE: I received a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. If you’ve read past book reviews, you’ll know that I don’t pull my punches when I believe they are warranted. I also try to provide balanced information so you can make your own decision to read or not read the book, even if you disagree with my opinion.