You Become the Experience (Don’t Just Look at It, Live It)

Humanity is evolving, and with that evolution comes a burning desire to discover more—to learn from the prospect of future opportunities as much as we learn from the past.

That’s what Expo 2020 Dubai did.

As an interactive, inclusive, and more relevant avatar of what the Epcot Center once was, Expo essentially banned "Don't Touch" signs and reinvented discovery through immersion and experience.

Expo intentionally created experiences that directly engaged and activated all five senses and created new ways for people to not only hear and admire other cultures, but be immersed in them. Living and feeling every pavilion and culture was more than just allowed—it was highly encouraged.

Implication: Experiential Commerce

Expo 2020 Dubai invited visitors to become a part of the experience. The reason for this was simple: to make visiting Expo more memorable.

At a time when stimuli are always all around us and talkability and the power of social media reign, standing out is harder today than ever before. It makes it harder for brands to be top-of-mind and makes it harder for people to remember messages.

As such, it makes the most sense to find clever ways to engage people through their senses, as “multi-sensory experiences allow information to be encoded in multiple areas of the brain, leading to greater memory retention, accuracy inrecall, and memory retrieval.”

There’s a real opportunity for brands to further develop their marketing and creative solutions by focusing on creating multi-sensory experiences that place people at the core of it all. Though undoubtedly a hard task, immersive experiences will help improve relationships between brands and consumers, while also delivering human-centric—and relevant—commerce strategies, increasing the likelihood of conversion.