Three objections keep brands out of experiential marketing

The gap between wanting it and doing it

EY's April 2026 study of Indian brands found 88% of surveyed brands increasing their experiential marketing spend, and put India's live events market at roughly ₹13,000 crore in 2025. The marketing leaders surveyed reported that 78% of consumers prefer experiential interactions with brands.

The scale is visible on the ground. The same report counts more than 2,000 organised Navratri events across cities, and found that over 10 lakh people travelled for live events in the last two years, from nearly 1,200 cities.

That last figure is the one worth stopping on. Among the brands that were not running experiential campaigns, fewer than one in three planned to start within a year. Wanting it and doing it are different, and the report says what stands between them.

What the inactive brands say

Among the brands not yet active, three reasons account for nearly everything, and none of them is that experiential does not work.

Each of the three is a fair objection, and each has an answer that does not involve a large first commitment.

Objection one: we do not know how

Seventy-one per cent is the biggest number on the chart, and it is the easiest to solve, because it is not a reason to build the capability. It is a reason to choose the right partner.

What you need to know is not how to run an activation. It is how to tell whether the people running it can. The questions that separate the two are practical and can be asked in a meeting: who from the pitch will be on site, whether the run sheet is real, what went wrong at the last one.

The format itself is less mysterious than it looks. The Vectus campaign was one idea in two vocabularies, a city retailer and a village haat, which is what most experiential work is: a message, a place, and something worth stopping for.

Objection two: it costs too much

Fifty-seven per cent cite budget, and they are right about one thing. Experiential is expensive per person reached. What it is not is expensive per person moved.

The mistake is to compare it with media that buys reach. A street performance in a market town will lose to a video campaign on cost per thousand, every time. That is the wrong contest. The tractor engine oil campaign used street theatre because the audience does not read advertising and does not stop for a brochure. It did stop for a show.

The way to lower the risk is to shrink the first commitment, not to skip it: one market, one format, one product that needs explaining.

Objection three: we cannot prove it worked

Forty-three per cent are unsure how to measure return, and this is the one where the answer is a habit rather than a tool. The problem is almost never that a measurement is impossible. It is that nobody decided what to measure before the build began.

The discipline is to write the number down before anything is built, and to compare against somewhere that did not get the activation. That is the same logic as the test for whether an ad actually caused a sale, applied to a stall instead of a campaign.

A first campaign that answers all three

The three objections have one thing in common: each is a reason to start small and start deliberately, not a reason to wait.

That is the practical shape of any experiential marketing engagement worth starting: small enough to afford, specific enough to measure, and run by people who can show how.