Phygital Brand Experience: Merging Physical and Digital Formats to Enhance Customer Engagement

Brand experience formats have recently evolved from mostly physical to digital and new phygital formats, the alternative that combines both physical and digital experiences simultaneously. Moved by the need for further research in this field, with not so many brand and academic referents of phygital brand experiences, this analysis pretends to illustrate a case study of a successful phygital brand experience: Crims, the Exhibition. This brand experience included a gamified phygital format that customers could access through their mobile devices and play while interacting with the physical space. The case study illustrates to what degree the consumers were interested in engaging phygitally with the brand and what were some of the elements of this successful integration of the phygital format. The conversion data reaching 27.5% of the customers, with a completion rate of 43.9%, despite the technological requirements, reveals important interest and engagement with the brand through this mixed reality format. The elements of the phygital proposal, like gamification, high interactivity with the physical experience, as well as brand content integration, have been identified as contributing positively to the engagement, while the technology requirements, personal data registration, and high complexity of the game were acknowledged as major barriers to the adoption of the phygital format in the brand experience.