What Cannes Lions Can Teach Us About Better Brand Experiences
What the world’s biggest creativity festival tells us about creating brand experiences people want to visit, stay in and share.
Cannes Lions might be a festival of creativity, but for one week each year, Cannes itself becomes an enormous exercise in brand experience.
Beaches become brand worlds. Hotels become content studios. Cafés become meeting places. Terraces become stages. The result is an interesting view of how brands are thinking about physical experience.
There are plenty of large-scale installations and attention-grabbing moments. But some of the most interesting ideas are much simpler.
Give people somewhere they genuinely want to be.
Make them feel welcome.
Create reasons to stay.
Help interesting things happen while they’re there.
So, what can brands learn from Cannes?
Think like a destination
One of the clearest shifts at Cannes is from temporary activation thinking towards destination thinking.
An activation might give someone a reason to visit.
A destination gives them reasons to stay and, potentially, come back.
That difference changes the design brief.
Instead of focusing entirely on how to attract attention from the outside, we start thinking about what happens once someone arrives. Is there somewhere comfortable to sit? Something to discover? A useful conversation to join? Food or drink? Entertainment? Programming that changes throughout the day?
The question becomes:
Why would someone choose to spend their time here?
That is relevant well beyond a festival environment.
A conference stand, retail pop-up, product launch or temporary brand space can all benefit from thinking about the experience as somewhere people choose to spend time, rather than somewhere they briefly pass through.
Hospitality communicates something about the brand
Cannes also demonstrates how much seemingly simple details can contribute to a brand experience.
A cold drink on a hot day. Shade. Comfortable seating. A warm welcome. Someone who knows when to start a conversation and when to leave you alone.
These things may sit outside what most traditionally think of as the creative concept, but they influence how someone experiences the brand. Hospitality is part of that experience.
How someone is welcomed, where they are seated, what they are offered and how they are looked after can all communicate something about the brand’s personality and values.
For some brands that might mean generous and informal. For others, considered and highly personalised.
The important part is that the service experience and creative experience feel like they belong to the same brand.
Learn more about our thoughts on What Hospitality Can Teach Us About Experience Design here.
Give people reasons to stay
Dwell time is often treated as something we measure after an experience.
It can also be something we intentionally design for.
Cannes provides a useful example because the most successful spaces often give people several reasons to remain. You might arrive for a talk and stay for lunch. Meet someone you know and sit down for a conversation. Discover another piece of programming. Record some content. Return later because something different is happening.
That creates a richer relationship with the space than a single interaction can provide.
Of course, longer dwell time isn’t automatically better.
The important question is what that additional time allows to happen.
If staying longer creates more opportunities for discovery, conversation, product interaction or community, then dwell becomes meaningful.
Build content into the experience
Cannes also shows how closely physical and digital brand experience now work together.
Podcast studios, creator spaces, live conversations and performances turn physical experiences into sources of content.
That’s a more interesting approach than adding a photo opportunity at the end and hoping people share it.
When content is considered from the beginning, the experience can create stories that travel beyond the people physically attending.
A conversation can become a podcast.
A performance can become social content.
An interaction might create something someone wants to share.
A useful piece of programming can reach an audience far beyond the room.
The question we find more useful than is it Instagrammable? is:
What could happen here that is worth sharing?
That puts the emphasis back on the experience itself.
Create the conditions for connection
Perhaps the biggest lesson from Cannes is that people come for people.
A brand might provide the beach, terrace or programme, but much of the value is created through the conversations and connections that happen there. That has implications for how we design brand experiences.
Connection doesn’t always need another scheduled networking session.
Sometimes it needs the right environment.
Shared tables can encourage conversation. Seating layouts can make joining a group easier. Programming can provide a natural starting point for discussion. Hosts can introduce people who have something useful in common.
Even the amount of unprogrammed time matters.
If every minute of an experience is filled, there may be very little room for the audience to create anything themselves.
Sometimes the role of experience design is to create the conditions for something valuable to happen between people.
If you want to know more about how we redesigned a networking experience through small intentional details read our case study here.
Give people a reason to return
A destination mindset also changes how we think about the experience journey.
Many brand activations are designed around one visit and one interaction.
At a multi-day festival like Cannes, brands have the opportunity to build a relationship over time.
Programming changes. Different people appear. Morning can feel different from evening. Someone might visit for a meeting on Tuesday and return for a talk on Wednesday.
This creates an interesting question for any recurring or longer-term brand experience:
What changes enough to make another visit worthwhile?
That might mean different programming, changing content, new products, rotating activities or simply creating a space people enjoy enough to use again.
Return behaviour can be designed too.
From Cannes to Your Brand Experience
There are hundreds of individual activations at Cannes that brands could look at and copy.
We’re more interested in understanding the principles underneath them.
Destination thinking can create reasons to stay.
Hospitality shapes how the brand feels.
Programming creates reasons to return.
Content can extend the experience beyond the physical audience.
And thoughtful environments can help people connect with each other.
At Just Honest Agency, we take signals like these and consider how they could translate through our Experience Architecture™ and 7S Design System™ for a completely different brand, audience and objective.
A technology conference shouldn’t look like a Cannes beach club. A private dinner doesn’t need a podcast studio because everyone else has one.
The useful question is what these experiences tell us about human behaviour. People stay where there is value in staying. They return when there is something worth returning for. And they share experiences when something worth talking about happened while they were there.
That gives brands much more to work with than simply trying to attract a crowd.
Designing a brand experience?
Whether you’re creating a pop-up, activation, launch or live brand environment, we can help you turn it into somewhere people want to spend time, engage and come back to.
Talk to Just Honest about your next brand experience.
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Disclaimer
The content published on this blog is for informational and inspirational purposes only. While we strive to provide up-to-date insights, expert opinions, and industry trends, the information shared should not be considered as professional advice tailored to any specific event or business need. All views expressed in our blog posts are our own and are intended to inspire creativity, spark innovation, and provide valuable insights into the world of brand experience, event marketing, experience design, event design and event management. However, event strategies, technologies, and trends evolve rapidly, and we recommend consulting with a professional before making any major event or experience-related decisions. Additionally, any third-party tools, platforms, or services mentioned in our blog posts are referenced purely for educational purposes. We do not endorse or receive compensation for mentioning them unless explicitly stated.
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