According to Brad Nierenberg, experiential marketing is the live, one-on-one interactions that allow consumers to create connections with brands.
First, experiential marketing focuses on providing sensory, emotional, cognitive, and rational values to the consumers.
Second, experiential marketing aims to create synergies between meaning, perception, consumption, and brand loyalty.
[10] The wide spread of the Internet and the increasing competition among online retailers has led to the rise of virtual experiential marketing (VEM).
VEM relies on an electronic environment that engages customers and arouses their emotional responses to create an unparalleled experience and consequently capture their loyalty.
[5] The elements which characterize virtual experiential marketing are: sense, interaction, pleasure, flow and community relationship.
In March 2006 the Advertising Research Foundation (ARF) defined Engagement as "turning on a prospect to a brand idea enhanced by the surrounding context".
[13] According to a study by Jack Morton Worldwide, 11 out of 14 consumers reported preferring to learn about new products and services by experiencing them personally or hearing about them from an acquaintance.
Starting in 2006 U.S. broadcast networks began guaranteeing specific levels of program engagement to large corporate advertisers.
[17] Keith Ferrazzi wrote in 2009 that Information Age was transitioning into what he termed the Relationship Age, "in which emotion, empathy, and cooperation are critical success traits" and where "technology and human interaction are intersecting and trust, conversation, and collaboration are top of mind and top of agenda".
[20] Three-dimensional engagement ("3DE")[21] has "not only length and width, but depth, where both giver and receiver connect to a higher power and are changed in the experience.
[23] That philosophy is that audiences should be engaged in the sales process when they want, and by which channels they prefer, through a process called “actionable empathy.”[24] Ippolito has argued that traditional top-down marketing results, largely, in the production and communication of white noise, whereas engagement marketing assumes a different approach: "Think of a salesperson who walks up to you in a store.
"After launching IMA in 2013, Ippolito shifted his focus to momentum marketing—described as "the next evolution of engagement marketing"—which shares the same customer-centric philosophy, but places a greater emphasis on leveraging data to reach target audiences online via their most well-traveled channels: "[M]odern consumers are hard to pin down; they're constantly in motion—traversing different spaces, utilizing different media, and as always, experiencing a range of different thoughts and feelings throughout any given day ... [The key is to] leverage the existing momentum of target consumers.