How to pull off a brand pop-up

Who needs a dedicated brick-and-mortar location when consumers can show up in droves to a temporary brand pop-up?

From product giveaways to immersive, world-building experiences, pop-ups are one way marketing departments can build brand awareness, drive social media conversation, and connect with audiences. To pull one off, experts like Marc Simons, co-founder of agency Giant Spoon, emphasized one important element: emotion.

“We want someone to feel something as they’re going through these experiences,” Simons told us.

Building emotion and audience connection begins far before a brand sets up shop in a pop-up location, and can continue long after its doors close. But it’s not the only key element to a successful event. We talked to agencies and brands about how they build the pop-ups of a consumer’s dreams, and what makes a brand experience or event successful.

Story time

Any brand can do a “worthy, memorable” pop-up or build an experience, according to Simons. It might be more natural for a company like HBO or Disney, which has the luxury of IP and storytelling to bring to life—but Simons said that the heart of a pop-up is a story, and it’s often his agency’s job to figure out the story to tell.

“When we’re actually building out the experience itself, it’s trying to craft a narrative,” Simons said. “There’s a beginning to the story, a middle to the story, and an end to the story, and that experience that you might walk through or participate in is something we put a lot of time and energy into crafting.”

Giant Spoon has worked on several entertainment properties, dating back to early work with HBO bringing Westworld to life, which Simons said marked a pivotal point in the agency’s ability to take pop-ups “to another level”; now, the agency has worked on pop-ups with brands in other categories like retail, CPG, and tech. And while crafting a story for a company like Google can look very different than bringing the world of Westworld’s Sweetwater to life, he said both are rooted in building out a brand experience in a memorable way.

For Google’s Project Genie, an AI-based world-building software product, rather than taking the perhaps expected product demo route, Simons said his team came up with a crystal ball concept that enabled attendees to physically select elements of a world from a set of choices, which demonstrated how the software worked in an interactive manner.

“The narrative in that is like, you are a world-builder…you’re the creator, go build this world, but do it in a way that people can understand and be like, ‘Oh okay, I understand what Project Genie is all about now,” he said.

For smaller companies, identifying and crafting the narrative can be rooted in the story of the brand itself. Goodwipes, a personal-care brand that makes personal cleansing wipes, focuses the narrative at their pop-ups around educating consumers about how they might benefit from the brand’s products, Meredith Diehn, SVP of marketing, told us.

The brand’s most recent pop-up involved a sniffable billboard in Los Angeles that showed off new scents and brand representatives handing out product onsite, and Diehn emphasized the importance of person-to-person interaction to really make the story hit home.

“We are building in a category that is unique and a little bit personal, and we want to have those one-on-one interactions [so] that we can make a lasting impression with consumers,” she said.

Social chatter

Pop-ups aren’t just about the people in the room, and how a pop-up shows up on social media can be just as important as how it feels in the moment. As Matt Sorrell, co-founder of micro-agency It’s Advertising Time, told us in an email, “The experience has to be entertaining enough that people want to post about it, creators want to cover it, and media wants to talk about it.”

At a Chili’s pop-up in April that Sorrell and his co-founder Jon Marshall worked on, audiences were invited to judge the value of Chili’s new Big Crispy chicken sandwich against fast-food chains’ offerings in the Big Crispy Food Court, a built-out space in NYC’s Union Square placed prominently next to a McDonald’s. Attendees watched an immersive show that put them in a 15-minute court session before they were asked to serve as part of the jury themselves.

To stoke the social media fire, Marshall said it was important to think about social strategy from the beginning, which meant “designing visually interesting moments, building interactive moments people can participate in, and partnering with creators who can amplify the experience.” For Big Crispy Food Court, that included a distinct courthouse-style exterior, the court session experience, and social content with creators like Sharm Sil, who posts about things to do in NYC.

Having a physical giveaway element can also be key to the social footprint of a brand pop-up, as it creates one more thing for attendees to share, Sorrell said. But being intentional about the item is what can be the difference between a lasting impression and what may feel like another piece of branded junk. Big Crispy Food Court attendees received a courtroom-style drawing of themselves, while those who attended the Goodwipes pop-up received small, sachet-style samples that Diehn said many customers might not be aware they offer.

Simons echoed the importance of social media being built into a pop-up experience, and emphasized that it’s been central to his agency’s strategy for about the last decade. But more recently, there has been one significant change—the importance of getting the right people in the room to help make that content stand out.

“I think the only difference today is there is much more of an intentional effort put behind leveraging creators to and influencers to actually help with that content,” he said. “That certainly helps to just make sure everything is clicking together.”