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SPAIN – Experiential Marketing at Unilever Innovation Fair by La 5ª
Each year, Unilever holds an Innovation Fair to publicise its main product novelties to its major customers, some of the biggest distributors in the country. It was important to Unilever to combine the presentation of its new campaigns and products with a relaxed activity for its customers.
Why keep the presentation of Unilever product innovations separate from the experience their customers should live out? And why not bring them a practical version of this experience and break out of the traditional “presentation + original activity” mould? Why not wager for something more close to experiential marketing? And so it was that La 5ª presented a proposal which would allow Unilever’s customers to live out a unique adventure as they moved through a maze populated by extraordinary creatures, bringing them closer to the products with their senses and appealing to their memories and feelings.
In order to make this experience a reality, La 5ª joined forces with the Teatro de los Sentidos (literally, “Theatre of the Senses”) a theatre company whose work focuses on the poetry of the senses and studies the relationships between sensory language and theatrical production. This company specializes in the creation of one-man shows where the members of the audience contribute to the performance. 
The winning concept of the Unilever contest was one which aimed to make these customers go back to enjoying the pleasure of small things by appealing to their memories, with an ever-present link to selected Unilever products: “Small things make the big difference”. At La 5ª, we wanted those people to walk away from our maze branded with a lasting memory. As it happens, one enters the labyrinth alone, barefoot and in dimmed lighting, which challenges the traveller to make use of his or her other senses, including “non-official” ones such as intuition and memory.One of the essential aspects of this event was to make visitors experience the magic of the Teatro de los Sentidos without forsaking the marketing messages to be sent out. We
therefore came up with the idea of creating a kind of Unilever Home, where each room would be devoted to a product and to the pleasant sensations this product evokes. The scent of Skip on a freshly made bed, the taste and aroma of Knorr soup (like granny used to make), the feeling on our skin after applying Pond’s products as a reflexion of our soul, the seductiveness which emanates from Magnum ice-cream or the relaxation instilled by drinking a hot Lipton infusion… priceless feelings which thanks to the dramaturgy created in partnership with the Teatro de los Sentidos will be remembered for a long time to come by those who experienced this event.