I was super-excited to catch up with Sheila Steinmark, CEO/CMO of MOGXP, a Plano, Texas-based agency that helps brands create memorable experiential marketing events. Sheila and I share a common passion in cause marketing, and our interview contains many pearls of wisdom for anyone seeking to orchestrate memorable, branded experiential events.
Sheila and I begin our conversation by addressing the concept of “brand purpose” and why it’s important for brands to make sure any cause marketing events they organize are aligned with the particular promise represented by the brand.
We then move on to the topic of “greenwashing” and why it’s critical for brands engaged in corporate philanthropy to avoid it, and address the fact that when consumers become aware that a brand is engaged in charitable giving, this awareness can function as a “tie-breaker.”
There’s a lot of money flowing into sponsored events these days and I wanted to get Sheila’s take on mistakes often made when brands engage in these sponsorships. As Sheila notes, one critical mistake that’s often made is under-resourcing the social media teams responsible for conducting the events themselves.
Another mistake is to rely too much on “hybrid” (real + virtual) events. As Sheila observes, “Consumers don’t want hybrid. If you are there, it waters down the experience when you have to interact with people who are online, and the people online never get the experience that people who were there are getting. So I think there will be more segregation in those types of events where everybody’s pushing for hybrid… I think it’s okay to do a live event, and then do a virtual event that is similar to it so that you offer it to other people. But it really waters down the virtual event by having people live.”
