Pernod Ricard: Measuring the lasting impact of the festival experience on consumers

Through its festival activations, Pernod Ricard is now seeking to go beyond simply satisfying participants in order to better understand what these experiences actually bring to its brands.

To support this effort, the teamsat Occurrence have developed a system with Pernod Ricard that combines on-site experience metrics, post-test data, and behavioral data. This approach makes it possible to measure what works during the activation, what remains in participants’ memories a few days later, and how these insights can inform brand strategies.

In this interview, Leopold Roussel,Consumer Insight,discusses the challenges of this approach, the insights it provides, and how this data helps shape the evolution of activations over the years.

Before discussing the methodology, what was the main challenge for Pernod Ricard with this study? What aspects of the festivalgoer experience did you want to shed light on—aspects that traditional feedback or standard KPIs couldn’t capture?

The challenge was to go beyond simply measuring satisfaction with an activation. It’s fairly easy to tell if festivalgoers enjoy an experience: did they like the venue, the atmosphere, the concept, did they have a good time…? But what really interested us was understanding what that experience could bring to the brand.

The idea was, in particular, to see if linking a brand to the festival experience could create something more emotional and memorable in the consumer’s mind: strengthening their connection to the brand, leaving a lasting impression, and creating lasting memories and brand recall. These are things that are difficult to achieve in the same way through shelf presence or advertising in traditional media.

The challenge today, therefore, is to understand the true power of this experiential lever, for which brand objectives it is relevant, and how to use it as part of a longer-term brand-building strategy.

You opted for a two-step approach, comparing the on-site experience with what people remember afterward. What did this approach help you understand about the alignment between the lived experience and the brand image, and about designing more impactful activations?

First, we measure the on-site experience, which we’ve been doing for several years with Occurrence. This allows us to evaluate concepts in concrete terms: what works, what doesn’t work as well, and what might need improvement. It’s a very hands-on approach that helps us optimize our activations.

Over the past year, we’ve added a post-test approach, which gives us more perspective. Much like what’s done with more traditional media, the idea is to see what remains a few days after the experience: do consumers remember the brand, does their perception change, and do brand affinity or the desire to purchase increase? This also allows us to better compare the impact of the experience with that of other communication channels.

And this year, we’ve further enhanced the setup with a behavioral component to better understand the reality of exposure: how many people walk past the setup, stop, enter the space, how long they stay there… and then compare this data with what they report having seen or remembered.

To what extent does this methodological approach provide you with new benchmarks to guide your activation strategies in the future?

What’s interesting is that this data gives us very concrete guidelines for action, both in the short and long term.

First, it allows us to refine our concepts year after year: understanding what works, what works less well, and sometimes making more decisive choices—even going so far as to discontinue certain elements when they fail to meet our objectives.

Foot traffic metrics also offer a highly operational dimension: they help us identify key peak times and thus better manage on-site operations—for example, by adjusting staffing levels or team organization. The goal is to deliver experiences that are increasingly relevant and effective.

Furthermore, on a more strategic level, these studies provide us with insights to better allocate our investments across the various brand-building levers. They help us better understand the environments where a brand truly belongs, which markets are most relevant for it, and how the in-store experience compares to other brand-building levers.

Finally, by compiling these results and establishing benchmarks across activations, we are gradually gaining a broader perspective: understanding what works best, for which brand, and in what context, and drawing lessons from this for future activations.