SEPTEMBER | COMPANY PROFILE
New company, veteran experience
MCI Experience’s Kim Mhyre
talks to Access about re-
inventing the live experience
What inspired MCI Experience?
As demand for more innovative,
creative and authentic brand experiences
grows, brands are expecting more from
their agency, than ever before. The most
successful brand experiences are based on
significant strategic knowledge of the brand,
its objectives and target audiences. Today,
experience focused marketing agencies
must consider all of the relevant touch
points, both live and online to ensure the
clients success, and this requires an agency
with an increasingly diverse range of skills
and approach.
In response, MCI Group launched a new
kind of brand experience agency with a
range of creative and strategic marketing
disciplines. MCI Experience has been created
to serve as an incubator of new, innovative
experience marketing capabilities for more
strategic, creative and immersive experience
marketing programmes and events.
We exist to help brands define and deliver
their marketing objectives and ambitions
through meaningful and memorable
live, digital and virtual experiences. Our
strategic design thinking approach to brand
storytelling is imaginative, immersive and
emotive. We partner with our clients to
create breakthrough marketing experiences
that achieve measurable business results.
What are your event bugbears?
The term ‘event’ tends to conjure up
images of a room full of delegates listening
to a speaker behind a podium or a hall full of
exhibition stands. Yes, these are experiences,
but they are a far cry from what’s possible.
The nature of event audiences is changing.
The days of thinking of event goers as
passive are gone. Today’s event audiences
are much more demanding, more impatient
and have high expectations that events
will be more engaging, personalised and
participatory. Thinking about events in a
traditional, logistics-led way l imits possible
business results as well as our potential
to create engaging brand experiences
that connect attendees in much more
meaningful, memorable and shareable ways.
What makes a great brand experience?
Brand researchers in the Journal
of Marketing define brand experience
as “sensations, feelings, cognitions,
and behavioural responses evoked by
brand-related stimuli that are part of a
brand’s design and identity, packaging,
communications, and environments.” All
of the individual exposures or touchpoints
taken together make up the experience. So,
in other words brand experience is literally
everything you have seen, heard, felt,
smelled or tasted about a brand. The brand
experience is everything a person knows
about a brand.
With this in mind, a great brand
experience needs to be designed with a
deep and empathetic understanding of the
audience. We are rapidly moving in to an era
of personalisation. Event audiences are no
longer happy to be one of the crowd. They
will insist that events and brand experiences
recognise them and know what they value.
The very best brand experiences will be
those that are designed to be authentic,
relevant, personalised, engaging, enjoyable
and shareable.
How does technology factor into your work?
Today’s event goers are technology-
enabled and active in the use of this
technology to provide many of the benefits
that events used to serve – content,
community and commerce. As a result, we
will continue to see breakthroughs in new
experience technologies, apps, social media,
AI, VR, drones, interactive video, projection
mapping, holograms and more.
What we now need to think about is how
we apply this dizzying array of technology
in the best and most meaningful ways to
enhance and extend the experience. Relying
on the traditional approaches and expertise
that the events industry has been using for
years to design event experiences will not
be sufficient to create the next generation of
on-live experiences. A new interdisciplinary
approach that engages a much wider range
of skills and disciplines is the future of
experience design in an increasingly digital
world.
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