Kathy Cunningham of Advanced Marketing Strategies represents client Mossy Automotive Group. Leon Kamins is the dealership’s general manager of sales.

Just about everyone who purchases a new vehicle starts by taking it on a test drive to see how it handles on the open road. Some dealerships even encourage indecisive buyers to take it home overnight.

It’s a tactic called the “puppy dog,” and the assumption is that they wouldn’t take a new truck or car home without wanting to keep it. They park it in the driveway, the family gets a look, goes for a spin, listens to the engine, smells its newness and sees the envy in their neighbors’ eyes and then the waffling is over.

The automobile test drive and the extended take-home test are nothing new.

But now there’s a new term for it, called “experiential marketing,” which, loosely defined, means to engage consumers’ emotions through firsthand, sensory experiences with products.

Experiential marketing was the “flavor of the day” at New York City-based Promotion Marketing Association Inc.’s annual conference in Chicago last month. Yet, when it came to the topic of accountability, attendees talked more about developing campaigns and being authentic than measuring a return on investment, according to Brandweek.com.

Meanwhile, results of a survey of 277 marketers across the globe by Jack Morton, an international marketing agency, released in late January showed that 75 percent plan to increase spending on experiential marketing in 2008.

Of those, half said they expect to spend from 5 percent to 10 percent more than in previous years while 12 percent indicated the increase would be from 11 percent to 25 percent more, and nearly one in 10 said they would increase spending by more than 25 percent.

Could the need to measure return on investment take the wind out of the sails for experiential marketing in a time of looming recession?

According to local advertising and marketing executives, the answer is no, since there are different ways to look at accountability and some experiential marketing costs little to nothing at all.

The prime example is the automobile test drive, which really doesn’t cost a dealership anything, said Kathy Cunningham, president of Advanced Marketing Strategies. San Diego-based Mossy Automotive Group is one of AM Strategies’ clients.

Another time-honored and inexpensive method is food sampling at grocery stores. Generally, the motive is to push items that are new or aren’t moving quickly off the shelves, but a big bonus that experiential marketing offers and traditional ads don’t is word-of-mouth advertising “because people are more likely to talk about an experience they had with a product than an ad they saw,” Cunningham said.

Value Of Measurement

Struggling to find a standard metric to assess accountability could mean missing out on growth opportunities with retailers who are demanding more programs tailored to their shoppers, Brandweek pointed out.