So you just wrapped up an absolutely killer brand activation. Your custom 12-foot sculpture was the talk of the event, people were lining up to take selfies with your branded props, and social media was buzzing. But now comes the million-dollar question: How do you actually prove to the people who sign the checks that your brand experiences delivered real results?
If you’re still measuring success with basic metrics like “foot traffic” and “impressions,” you might be missing the whole point of experiential marketing. Today’s brand experiences need to be measured like the powerful business drivers they actually are—not just pretty installations that look good on Instagram.
At Smash Design, our team of sculptors, scenic artists, and prop makers has crafted everything from Netflix character sculptures to stage sets for Presidential inaugurations. One thing we’ve learned? The measure of success for every project is different for every event! But after years of building viral brand experiences, we’ve learned that the hardest part isn’t creating jaw-dropping props—it’s proving that our services are a great investment worthy of brands with a big marketing budget!
Here’s what we’ve learned:
Beyond the Vanity Metrics: What Really Drives Business
Let’s be honest: counting how many people walked past your activation tells you almost nothing about whether your brand experiences actually worked. The brands winning with experiential marketing services are tracking metrics that connect directly to business outcomes.
The Engagement Quality Revolution
Smart marketers know that 100 deeply engaged participants beat 1,000 casual passersby every time. When Smash Design creates custom sculptures and themed environments, we’re crafting experiences that create meaningful connections between brands and consumers. By making brands interactive in the most memorable ways, we can engage as many people as possible.
This is how we measure that engagement:
- Dwell time: How long people actually spend with your installation (if it’s under 30 seconds, your brand experiences need work)
- Interaction depth: Are people just looking, or are they touching, playing, and exploring your custom props?
- Conversation starters: How many meaningful conversations does your activation generate for your brand ambassadors?
Social Amplification That Actually Amplifies
Everyone wants their brand experiences to go viral online, but not all social media buzz is created equal. Echoing what we just said about engaged participants vs. passersby, a thousand generic posts with your hashtag pale in comparison to fifty authentic, story-rich shares that showcase real emotional connections.
Smash Design’s sculptors and scenic artists design every prop with shareability in mind—but the kind that drives brand affinity, not just fleeting attention.
Here are the social metrics we’re after:
- Story-driven shares: Posts that tell a complete narrative about the brand experience
- Organic reach per post: How far each individual share travels through networks
- Sentiment analysis: The emotional tone of social conversations around your activation
- Save rates: How many people bookmark your content for future reference
We can get a sense of these metrics using social platforms’ built-in tools, but the devil is often in the details. An honest assessment has to include actually reading and engaging with the posts and people who are sharing and discussing your brand experience online. Is there genuine enthusiasm there, or does it all feel a bit perfunctory?
Behavioral Impact: The Holy Grail of Brand Experiences
Here’s where experiential marketing services separate from traditional advertising: the ability to drive actual behavior change. When someone interacts with your branded sculptures, are they just entertained, or are they actually more likely to choose your brand? It’s not an easy question to answer! However, we believe we’ve identified some factors that give us a clue.
Purchase Intent and Consideration Lift
Smart brands measure how brand experiences impact the entire customer journey:
- Consideration lift: How much more likely participants are to consider your brand
- Purchase intent changes: Measured through pre- and post-activation surveys
- Brand preference shifts: Changes in competitive brand rankings among participants
Sorry, digital marketers: Measuring these factors requires actually communicating with customers and potential customers both before and after a brand activation experience. There’s no dashboard with the numbers queued up for you. But it’s worth it!
The Long-Tail Effect
The best brand experiences create ripple effects that extend far beyond the activation itself. Smash Design’s custom props and installations create memorable moments that people carry with them long after the event ends.
You can track that long-term impact through:
- Brand recall after 30+ days: Do people still remember your activation weeks later?
- Word-of-mouth multiplication: How many additional people hear about your brand through participant storytelling?
- Website traffic patterns: Spikes in organic search following cool brand activations
Again, some of these require seeking people out and asking them questions. Embrace it!
The Attribution Challenge: Connecting Dots That Matter
One of the biggest challenges in measuring brand experiences is attribution—connecting experiential touchpoints to downstream business results. Unlike digital advertising with clean click-through paths, experiential marketing services create influence that shows up across multiple channels over extended timeframes.
The most sophisticated brands use attribution models that account for experiential touchpoints alongside traditional marketing channels. When someone attends your brand activation and purchases your product three weeks or three months later, how much credit does the experience deserve? Well, it’s hard to know if you haven’t first measured such activity before the activation happens!
Cool brand activations often create localized business impact that shows up in sales data, website traffic, and brand search volume within specific markets. Smash Design’s most successful clients establish baseline metrics before activations and track lift patterns that reveal experiential influence.
Tech Integration: Making Measurement Seamless
Some modern brand experiences integrate digital touchpoints that make measurement more precise. When Smash Design creates custom sculptures and props, we’re often asked incorporate QR codes or app integrations that create measurable interaction pathways.
These integrations enable:
- Individual journey tracking: Following participants from activation to conversion
- Real-time optimization: Adjusting experiences based on immediate feedback
- Personalized follow-up: Connecting with participants through their preferred channels
If your brand experience doesn’t immediately have visitors pulling their phones out, it’s already a dud. Give them something to do with those expensive toys besides snapping pics!
The ROI Reality Check
Let’s get real: We’re not making fine art for art’s sake here (even if it feels pretty close sometimes)! Ultimately, brand experiences need to justify their investment through measurable business impact. We know our work will ultimately be judged on its ROI:
- Customer acquisition cost: How efficiently do brand experiences generate new customers?
- Lifetime value impact: Do experiential participants become more valuable customers?
- Organic marketing amplification: How much free marketing does your activation generate?
As you can tell, measuring success doesn’t end when your brand activation ends, or even a month or a year later. That’s the power of the memories these experiences create! Putting a dollar figure on that power isn’t always quick or easy, but that doesn’t mean the value isn’t real. And accurate valuation can take time.
Start Tracking Those KPIs Now!
Creating effective measurement starts with defining clear objectives before designing your brand experiences. It’s like we said at the start: The measure of success for every project is different. Smash Design’s studio of talented sculptors and craftspeople delivers our best work to clients who establish measurement frameworks that clearly communicate their business goals. Our job is to maintain the creative integrity that makes brand experiences powerful.
The key is choosing metrics that matter to your specific business context. We can help! Ready to create brand experiences that deliver measurable results? Smash Design’s sculptors, scenic artists, and prop makers are standing by to help your brand or agency engineer viral activations that look amazing and drive provable business impact. Let’s get started!