The New “Immersion” Marketing & What It Means for Your Fashion Brand
“There’s another one!”
My husband and I had been driving along the steep winding curves on the Road to Hana for more than 30 minutes.
“Man, they have this part of the island on lockdown.”
Every 100 yards, it was like a dose of deja vu.
“This has to be the 15th one we’ve seen!”
By this point, it had almost become a game of “I Spy,” distracting us from the stunning Maui scenery that we should have been looking at.
And then, just as we approached the final turnoff to Koki Beach, we see the last one:
“HULI HULI CHICKEN… Just Ahead!”
I look over at my husband, “It almost makes me want to go…”
He looks back: “Shan, we don’t even eat meat.”
And so started my obsession with the marketing tactics of Huli Huli Chicken, a beach-front, plastic-table-clothed, open-grille, open-air shack that makes “the best huli huli chicken in the world.” (According to the rave reviews on Yelp.)
Because here’s the thing:
The strategy that the chicken restaurant uses is pretty much applicable to any other business.
ESPECIALLY a fashion business that you run on the internet.
The 15-25 signs that we saw on a 30ish-minute stretch of road is synonymous to the marketing output you have to produce online.
Because, as Huli Huli Chicken already knows, we live in a time of immersion marketing.
And I don’t say that to mean you need to go out and hire a PR team, a social media manager and an email marketing strategist.
What I mean is that you need to *immerse* your customer in your brand.
It’s not enough anymore to post on Instagram twice a week, send an email to your list once a month and ditch Twitter altogether.
During a time when more marketing messages are competing than ever before, it’s safe to say that your potential customer isn’t even paying attention until you feel like you’re being annoying.
Read that again.
And there’s a big difference in spamming your audience with the same images and text over and over.
That is annoying.
What I mean is that you want to feel like your marketing efforts are overkill.
That you’re going above and beyond to cut through the noise and be a brand that’s worth paying attention to.
How do you think the owner of the chicken shack felt when he was hammering in his twelfth sign and could see another one just a few yards ahead of it?
Overkill? Maybe.
But you don’t get a line of salivating customers, waiting for hot chicken on a hot day, for doing anything less.
