From mom-and-pop shops to large corporations, experiential marketing is also becoming one of the most effective team-builders for businesses of all shapes and sizes.

>>Creating Connections With Experiential Marketing

Consider Brand Fuel’s Make & Bake printing promotion, which gives attendees a chance to create their very own promotional products, like T-shirts, sweatshirts, aprons, bags and even fanny packs. Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina (BCBSNC) decided Make & Bake would be a perfect team-building exercise, so they signed up for an event hosted at Hey Monkey! Design & Print in Durham, NC.

“The team only gets together once a quarter, so I wanted to do something different, fun and memorable,” says David Laboy, director of diversity and work life at BCBSNC. “I also wanted to promote a sense of team identity. Printing a logo that came as a result of a team contest helped with that objective.” Other bonuses of the experience? Supporting a local business and doing an activity that reinforced Laboy’s team-building theme of creativity.

Laboy says BCBSNC’s employees enjoyed creating their own T-shirts alongside their colleagues so much that some still wear them to this day. “Overall, it was a great bonding experience I would recommend to others,” he says. “The team not only walked away with a couple of T-shirts, we walked away with a memorable experience.”

It was an experience that certainly wouldn’t have been nearly as memorable if employees were simply handed a logoed T-shirt while sitting at their cubicles. “While the experience becomes a part of a person’s memory,” says Danny Rosin of Brand Fuel, “promotional products become a lasting physical connection to the experience someone had.”