Book excerpt: The most researched, documented, and comprehensive manifesto on experiential marketing. As customers take control over what, when, why, and how they buy products and services, brands face the complete breakdown and utter failure of passive marketing strategies designed more than a half-century ago. To connect with a new generation of customers, companies must embrace and deploy a new marketing mix, powered by a more effective discipline: experiences. Experiential marketing, the use of live, face-to-face engagements to connect with audiences, create relationships and drive brand affinity, has become the fastest-growing form of marketing in the world as the very companies that built their brands on the old Madison Avenue approach—including Coca-Cola, Nike, Microsoft, American Express and others—open the next chapter of marketing. . . as experiential brands. Using hundreds of case studies, exclusive research, and interviews with more than 150 global brands spanning a decade, global experiential marketing experts Kerry Smith and Dan Hanover present the most in-depth book ever written on how companies are using experiences as the anchor of reinvented marketing mixes. You’ll learn: The history and fundamental principles of experiential marketing How top brands have reset marketing mixes as experience-driven portfolios The anatomy of a brand experience The psychology of engagement and experience design The 10 habits of highly experiential brands How to measure the impact of experiential marketing How to combine digital and social media in an experiential strategy The experiential marketing vocabulary How to begin converting to experiential marketing Marketers still torn between outdated marketing models and the need to reinvent how they market in today’s customer-controlled economy will find the clarity they need to refine their marketing strategies, get a roadmap for putting their brands on a winning path, and walk away inspired to transition into experiential brands.