Brand Activation Guide: Creative Ideas for Brand Activations

Brand activations are marketing activities that bring consumers into direct contact with a brand. They invite audiences to engage with products and brand representatives at events such as pop-ups, meetups, and launch parties.

For small businesses, brand activations are a chance to turn in-person moments into a growing community. Take athleisure brand Gym+Coffee, who launched a series of Sunday morning meetups. There people could take an interval training class or do yoga in a park, then grab coffee and hang out. Their first event drew 20 people; by the 10th week, around 300 showed up. 

In this guide, you’ll learn how brand activations work in practice, both through real-world examples and tips from experiential marketing expert Aaron Connelly. You’ll also learn how to measure brand activation return on investment (ROI).

What are brand activations?

Brand activations are marketing campaigns that engage consumers directly. Their primary goals are to promote your brand, create memorable experiences, and forge lasting emotional connections with customers.

“A brand activation is any time a brand reaches a consumer in real life,” says Aaron Connelly, founder and creative director of Very! Creative Agency, an experiential marketing firm. “It can be as small as sending a well-educated brand representative to Sephora to talk about your products or as large as a multimillion-dollar consumer conference like Disney’s D23.”

That direct contact helps to build trust, he says. When a consumer walks into a space a brand inhabits, they see what the brand is about firsthand. 

Here are a few common types of brand activations:

• Pop-ups

• Sponsorships

• Launch parties

• Giveaways

• Stunts

• Meetups

• In-store events

Brands can combine approaches or come up with something entirely new. What matters, according to Aaron, is creating space for consumers to have a good time and leave with a positive brand perception.

Brand activation ideas

• Pop-up experiences
• Offline meetups
• Educational launch events
• Influencer events
• Club partnerships

Here are five ideas to inspire your next brand activation campaign, along with ways to turn a one-time experience into lasting customer relationships:

Pop-up experiences 

Pop-ups are limited-time-only installations that let customers interact directly with your products and your brand. 

You might host a pop-up in a café, a market, or a borrowed retail space. Aaron favors casual experiences, like a beauty brand client’s pop-up in a San Francisco café. “You’re having a coffee. You’re grabbing a croissant. It’s a really beautiful café, and you can just hang out,” he says.

If you’re selling on-site, you can use Shopify POS to sync in-person sales, inventory, and customer data with your online store, so pop-up shoppers join the same customer base you market to online.

Not every pop-up needs to focus on sales. If your priority is capturing leads, Aaron recommends giving a brand representative a tablet and asking for an email address as “the price of admission,” so you can follow up after the event.

Offline meetups

Aaron expects offline meetups to become more common over the next few years. He describes the example of a brand taking customers on a hike, handing out disposable cameras, and asking everyone to leave their phones in the car. 

“You’re going to develop a relationship with the brand, but you’re also going to develop a relationship with all these other people that you have something in common with because of the brand,” he says.

The most effective meetups build on something your customers already love, like Gym+Coffee’s workouts followed by coffee. 

“Giving consumers a way to enjoy something they already enjoy makes them feel heard and understood,” Aaron says. “If you tap into their curiosities, they’re going to be curious about what you’re selling.”

Meetups are also a source of content, which Aaron says shows your audience that you value your community and gets people excited about future events. You might send a photographer or videographer or use contests, giveaways, and hashtags to encourage attendees to create and share user-generated content. 

“Now you have this whole content arm you can deploy to bring more people in,” Aaron says.

Educational launch events

Aaron is skeptical of big, traditional launch parties. 

“We’re so inundated with all different kinds of brand events that a big launch event can just feel a little in your face,” he says. 

He prefers events that educate consumers, which he says can drive sales by showing how new products fit in with the rest of your line.

The coffee and home goods brand Fellow took this approach with the grand opening of its second retail store in Venice, California. The launch event invited people to check out new products and pick up free ones. 

“To have hundreds of people show up on opening day, brew coffee together and just have a great time—it was a pretty special moment and activation for our brand,” says founder Jake Miller.

The event combined product education with casual, community-building energy.

“The idea was: come in, brew a cup of coffee with our team, learn a little bit about our products. And whether or not you walk out with one of our products, hopefully you walk out knowing a bit more about coffee,” Jake says.

As with pop-ups, launch events are a place to capture contact information so you can follow up with attendees. You might share a discount code or invite them to opt in to marketing emails.

“One thing that I think would be very powerful is getting attendee email addresses and just saying, ‘Thank you for coming,’” Aaron says. “No links, no product information, no sales; just ‘We appreciate having you.’”

Influencer events

Influencer marketing partnerships can take a few forms. You might hire an influencer to host a consumer-facing activation or invite influencers to attend your event and amplify it on social channels.

The beauty brand Kopari partnered with the model Ella Halikas to co-host “confidence sessions,” first at an intimate creators-only event, and later at a larger community pool party in Los Angeles with both microinfluencers and consumers on the guest list. On an episode of the Shopify Masters podcast, Kopari’s former head of marketing and ecommerce, Toral Patel, says content from the event fed into the brand’s marketing channels for months.

You can use Shopify Collabs to find and recruit influencers who share your brand values and are popular with your target audience, then track the sales each creator drives with affiliate links and unique discount codes.

Aaron’s advice is to balance influencer events with those for consumers. 

“I love influencers,” he says. “I work with them all the time, and I think that using them strategically at events is extremely important. But if a company’s entire IRL experience strategy revolves around influencer guests, you’re just leaving so many people off the table. I think it’s fun to give a customer an experience in exchange for all the loyalty they’ve shown you.”

Club partnerships

Community groups like run clubs, fitness studios, and hobby groups can give you regular access to your target audience.

When the energy drink company Guru Energy learned from customer messages that its drinks were popular as a pre-workout boost for runners, they partnered with one of the largest running clubs in Quebec. 

“We’re with them every single week across all run clubs to effectively sample, get community feedback, and do VIP drops with their community,” says Vice President of Marketing Shingly Lee on Shopify Masters.

That approach reflects how Guru chooses events that build on their brand’s identity and support their marketing goals. 

“We want to build our brand into our community’s world versus pushing ourselves at mass sampling events or popping up in places that have little to no relevance,” Shingly says. 

Aaron says that a partnership doesn’t need to be an obvious fit; an energy drink or sunscreen brand can partner with a run club just as well as a sneaker brand can. You’re offering a way to “integrate your product into their everyday lives,” he says.

Showing up week after week can also build loyalty. 

“When a brand shows up in a place its consumers are already excited to be, it shows a level of thoughtfulness that says, ‘This brand actually knows me,’” Aaron says. 

A club partnership also gives you ongoing access to people in your target audience, so you can run surveys or focus groups, test new products, or launch a word-of-mouth marketing strategy.

How to measure brand activation ROI

Return on investment compares what your activation earned with what it cost, expressed as a percentage. Here’s the formula you can use to calculate it: 

Brand activation ROI = [(Revenue attributable to the activation − Activation cost) / Activation cost] x 100 

A positive result means the event earned more than it cost, and the higher the percentage, the better your return. 

“ROI is a tough thing to measure,” Aaron says. 

A strict calculation would capture attributable revenue in perpetuity. 

To make post-event sales easier to track, Aaron recommends capturing attendee contact information and distributing cards with event-specific QR codes or discount codes. When a customer lands on your site via the unique URL, makes a purchase with an event code, or checks out using a recently captured email address, you can reasonably credit those purchases to the activation. 

“This is what I do with my brands all the time,” Aaron says. “They go into their Shopify, create a discount code, put it on cards, and print them out.” 

Aaron also recommends tracking these metrics alongside ROI: 

• Attendees. Attendance is one measure of an activation’s reach, and an event that quickly reaches capacity signals demand beyond the people who got in. 

• Leads captured. New email addresses and contacts are “one of the things that brands are asking for the most,” Aaron says.

• Social media coverage. Social coverage is another proxy for impact. Social listening tools can track posts about your event, along with social media metrics like engagement, impressions, and reach.

• Earned media value. Earned media value (EMV) estimates what the organic coverage generated by your event would have cost as paid media. 

• Event sales. Your POS system can report on on-site revenue, number of sales, average order value (AOV), revenue per attendee, and conversion rate.