Last month, we brought together a group of brand experience leaders at Maison Assouline for ‘An Invitation To Play’, a breakfast conversation about the future of play in brand experience. Speaking on the topic were our own Gemma Ruse; Sarah Boston, Global Director of Creative Concept and Innovation at Christian Louboutin; Sophie Howarth, Creative Retail Design and Experience Director at Coty UK; and Tim Nash, Founder of Shop Drop Daily.

One question surfaced more than any other: how do brands justify the investment in playful experiences?

The challenge is that traditional retail logic, spend X and make Y back, doesn’t apply anymore. A pop-up or experience rarely returns its investment in direct sales, and measuring it that way sets you up to fail.

“An experience or pop up is rarely going to directly return what you spent because it’s no longer just a transactional space,” said Tim Nash. “You have to see it as part of the wider consumer journey. It becomes part of the media spend.” The experience is the advert, except that unlike a page in a magazine or a billboard, people choose to be there, participate in it, and tell their friends about it.

Which means the first question a brand needs to answer isn’t how much to spend, but what the experience actually needs to do. “A lot of briefs ask for absolutely everything,” Gemma observed. “But really it comes down to: what is the one thing this experience needs to achieve? That’s the metric.” Whether you’re looking to boost awareness, deepen existing customer loyalty or encourage product trial, each calls for a different approach. An experience trying to do everything at once rarely does any of them justice.”

Bringing that same level of clarity to how you approach creative concepts is just as important. “Blocking out that much time and space to one concept is scary,” said Sarah Boston. But the alternative, diluted creativity spread thinly across every touchpoint, is the bigger commercial risk.

The brands worth talking about are the ones that build from a single great idea, letting every decision follow from the story. “The product itself needs to tell a story,” Nash said. “Every decision from the very beginning around the story.” Moncler’s ‘Puffy Summer’ is a good illustration of this. A giant inflatable octopus clung to the façade of 10 Corso Como during Milan Design Week. The same creatures surfaced in Seoul, Hong Kong and Paris. The campaign, the physical spaces and the digital content all spoke the same language, and as Nash put it, “you’re still playing inside that Moncler world even when you go online.”

The return on brave creativity doesn’t stop when the experience ends. Boston reflected on experiences that Christian Louboutin produced years ago and the ongoing return they continue to generate: “People still talk about windows we did years ago. And because of that creativity we still get incredible locations in Selfridges.” Our own collaboration with Christian Louboutin at Selfridges in 2012 is a case in point. Over a decade later, that work still comes up in conversation.

“Maybe doing really powerful creativity is just about being brave,” Boston said. “Some brands are brave and some aren’t.”

The question worth asking isn’t whether you can afford to invest in a truly committed experience. It’s whether you can afford not to.

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