One of the world’s most influential and popular brands, the giant Adidas, is using the city of Dubai as a sort of experimental laboratory for the communication of the future, launching innovative promotional methods (also offline) with the aim of engaging the public on an unprecedented level.

Indeed, we find ourselves in a rather peculiar era, in which products have given way to experiences, to conscious and meaningful purchasing choices, to first-hand experimentation with real brand experiences, thus stepping into the value and content universe proposed by companies in extreme depth. Compared to fifteen or twenty years ago, the relationship between consumers and brands has changed completely, in a way that would never have been thought possible only a few years ago.

The intimacy revolution

From a detached and predominantly mechanical, almost cold relationship that began with the marketing of the product and ended with the purchase by the end consumer, we have moved to a much deeper, much more intimate relationship, also based on a continuous dialogue between the two parties even after the purchase.

More than products, brands nowadays are specialising in creating brand experiences to offer their customers, responding to a very specific demand that comes precisely from the most evolved consumers. The latter not only want to touch the product with their hands, test its functionality and technical features, but also want to grasp its deeper meaning, tapping directly into the purest essence of the brand.

Every purchase, for j today’s consumers, has become a way to express their personality, to communicate their values, which in some cases largely coincide with those of the brand. And in order to grasp this hidden meaning in each product, for some time now, consumers have begun to demand intense and all-encompassing experiences that put them in direct contact with the brand’s most intimate values, which are, after all, also their own.

The role of experiences

It is precisely because of this that brands have started to offer increasingly engaging offline experiences, trying to take their intimacy with their audience to an even deeper level. In the age of social media and digitised communication, some brands are incredibly retracing the path of technological and digital evolution in reverse, returning to offline and to concrete experiences that can generate strong emotions, an equally unassailable loyalty and above all a positive association with the brand and all its ramifications, including products.

In the city of Dubai, Adidas created a sort of participatory billboard, choosing passers-by in the street as protagonists and inviting them to take an active part in promoting the brand. Not long ago, in fact, to promote the creation of a fully opaque women’s swimming costume, Adidas created a sort of small pool with its logo, allowing all women to dive in and try on the new swimming costume in front of everyone.

From the outside, behind the Adidas logo and what at first glance would appear to be an advertising poster, real women could be seen swimming in their swimming costumes, moving in the deep blue of the small pool and creating a surreal contrast with the brand’s logo.

Adidas has therefore literally interpreted the meaning of the expression ‘immersive’, creating an online experiential path that allows its customers to dive into the brand’s reality and take part in its active promotion, in the very life of the product (i.e. the swimming costume).

Once immersed in the brand’s experiential universe, there will no longer even be a need to promote the products, because the customer will have already unconsciously accepted them as something natural and positive, and will therefore look forward to owning some and using them, precisely because of their ability to reproduce (on a smaller scale) the emotions felt during the experiential and immersive paths organised by the brand.

This way of dealing with their customers has also been successfully applied by the best online gambling portals, which have for some time now begun to offer their users increasingly intense and exciting gaming experiences within the magical world of online entertainment.

In addition to offering a wide selection of the best online casinos in UAE and more traditional gaming experiences, these portals also offer extremely useful guides and reviews full of advice for users, especially those who are accessing such a portal for the first time. The fact that they are made by a team of experts, all industry professionals with years of experience behind them, is one more reason to consider them reliable and safe, in every respect.

Nowadays, consumers are not won over by the sparkle of products, but by the intensity of the experiences they are offered.