According to surveys issued by C+R Research Inc., an astounding 91 percent of beer drinkers prefer craft beer over big-name options, the latter category obviously including Anheuser-Busch Cos. LLC's Budweiser brand. Survey respondents said taste and quality were by far the biggest factors separating the two kinds of brew. This was frustrating for Budweiser because, despite the size of its $12 billion operation, it felt it lavished as much painstaking artistry on its product as any craft beer. How, then, could it capably market itself to this discriminating demographic?

The solution to Budweiser's brewing concerns was evident in those same consumer behaviors and predilections. The C+R Research surveys also found that 43 percent of respondents visit a brewpub or craft brewery at least once a month. It was clear to the company that these drinkers enjoyed a physical experience where they might interact with brewmasters whom they considered more craftsmen than chemists.

Budweiser recognized that a road show going straight to beer drinkers would allow it to deliver a physical experience with the small-scale facsimile of its brewery. Additionally, the mobile event would include its top-notch brewmasters who could communicate Budweiser's heritage while educating and entertaining drinkers along the way.

Working with St. Louis-based experience agency Switch, the company outfitted a pair of 48-foot-long trailers as mobile breweries, each with customized refrigeration units, four brewing vessels, a fermentation tank, and a tasting room. The exteriors of the trailers were clever visual nods to the brand's history with graphics that referenced sections of the century-old Anheuser-Busch plant in St. Louis.

The Budweiser Brewmaster Tour launched in 2013, with each trailer assigned its own route on either side of the Mississippi River. Budweiser quickly established a template that it would follow at hundreds of events where beer is an integral part of the activities, e.g., food, sports, and music festivals. First, the highly visible trailer would park near the event grounds. When visitors approached the vehicle, two brand ambassadors greeted them and offered quick explanations of what awaited inside. Five to seven guests at a time took a brief poll of their attitudes toward Budweiser beer before being admitted. Once inside the small-scale reproduction of a brewery, the group chatted with one of the brewmasters who flew to each stop. Tour members also had the opportunity to feel and smell the core ingredients used to produce Budweiser over the course of its 30-day brewing process and learn how the beverage is matured in tanks covered with strips of beechwood that allow the beer to attain a delicate flavor. Visitors who found themselves thirsty by this point were invited to enjoy a sample of Bud and then kick back in the branded beer garden.

That first year, more than 150,000 visitors took the Brewmaster Tour, and the results were intoxicating: The company found via post-tour surveys that 57 percent of guests were more likely to purchase Budweiser after their brief but persuasive visits. The tour, which has continued in multiple iterations over the years, turned out to be an idea that, unlike beer itself, never goes flat.

Henkel Corp. found itself in a sticky situation in 2018 when it planned to debut its newest line of Loctite adhesives. The Rocky Hills, CT-based company wanted a firm, consistent message for its business-to-business customers that would hold as long as Loctite itself.

After a short debate, the company determined the most compelling strategy would be to initiate a mobile-marketing tour. It had previously deployed a mobile lab to considerable success, and marketers felt this would be a logical extension of that effort. Such an approach, they figured, would allow the company to craft and deliver a uniform message straight to B2B customers that would communicate Loctite adhesives' most persuasive selling points, namely strength, safety, and flexibility.

Assisted by event-management company Spevco Inc., Loctite outfitted a 48-foot semi-trailer with touchscreen displays and an expandable side for storage. More importantly for its purposes, though, the trailer would offer something missing from product literature and the like: live, physical, and memorable demonstrations and vignettes of the adhesives' attributes.

The intended audience for the road show, which was christened the Seeing is Believing tour, would be various original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), maintenance and overhaul plants, and fabrication engineers. Loctite then mapped out a series of roughly 30 stops it would make over a 40-week period. Lacking any particular hard goals, Loctite would nonetheless take some basic measures, such as attendance and leads, to create a baseline for future mobile-marketing efforts.

When the Seeing is Believing trailer began its cross-country sojourn in 2018, it typically arrived at a scheduled site early in the day, then opened its doors from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. Visitors who entered the trailer expecting ponderous marketing pitches got something 180-degrees different – lighthearted but memorable set pieces, including a branded porch swing and a heavy boxing bag attached to the trailer's ceiling not by industrial-strength metal nuts and bolts but by a few sprinkles of a Loctite adhesive. Additional demos showcased the product line's shear strength, vibration resistance, and other features.

But the crown jewel of the tour was the Big Bang, a custom-built robotic device that forcefully grabbed both ends of a carbon-steel rod – part of which was attached to a flat metal surface by a mere three drops of Loctite – and subjected the rod to an ever-growing amount of force shown on a digital display. The tension in the rod grew and grew as the display flashed the astonishing amount of stress being incrementally applied. Finally, at almost 10,000 pounds of force, the equivalent of more than 10 Steinway grand pianos, the steel rod underwent what the company euphemistically called "rapid unscheduled disassembly" as it snapped in two with a lurid crack like a pretzel stick. But while one part of the rod went flying, the segment affixed to the metal surface held fast.

Like a traveling rock group, the tour hit almost 30 cities from 2018 well into 2019, replicating the memorable demos for more than 1,000 attendees overall, averaging 150 people per stop and accumulating 33 hard leads – results that ran about 20 percent better than the company had anticipated. It appears that Loctite proved seeing is indeed believing – and maybe buying, too.

According to Benjamin Franklin, "An investment in knowledge pays the best interest." That's what Robert Bosch Tool Corp., a maker of power tools and other industrial technologies, confirmed when it used an educational road show to better position itself in a highly competitive $16 billion market.

Given that research firm 24/7 Wall St. LLC concluded construction workers have the 13th most dangerous occupation in the country, Bosch, working with Switch, determined that reaching out to this group with an educational program could hoist its profile over its competitors like a tower crane. Further, the specific training Bosch had in mind would mirror the instruction that state and federal laws require safety supervisors at construction sites to give anyway. Such a program would likely be welcomed by the vulnerable workers, as well as the construction companies that would find themselves in the enviable position of having someone else volunteer to do their work for them.

Bosch planned to make its stops in various markets over a six-month period last as long as three weeks each: two weeks training workers at construction sites and one week spent with nearby distributors. To avoid looking like spiels on wheels, each stop would be staffed by specialists on a variety of safety topics. Finally, to measure the road show's effectiveness, Bosch set a main goal as blunt as a hammer: increase sales to regional distributors.

After Bosch identified building sites in roughly a dozen cities, the Power Tour began its cross-country odyssey in 2016 using a Ram Truck 5500 with a 16-foot trailer. On a typical day, the vehicles would set up at a construction site. Workers there did their jobs as usual and then headed toward the trailer for a free meal courtesy of Bosch. The presentations began after lunch, with speakers examining topics extending from personal-protection gear and proper hydration to new federal guidelines regarding reducing exposure to silica dust – and, not coincidentally, Bosch tools' superiority. Once the worker-safety segments wrapped up, Bosch drove the trailer to local distribution partners. Similar to its pre-arrival efforts at construction sites, the company publicized its upcoming stops with literature promoting special discounts.

By the end of 2016, the Power Tour made nearly 200 stops on its half-year journey, exposing about 20,000 workers to the brand and increasing sales to distributors. It was such a success that Bosch decided to keep it rolling indefinitely, tinkering with and improving it along the way. Starting in 2017, for example, Bosch added another vehicle to hit more cities. Then it augmented its educational curriculum with experts who, intriguingly, would hail from outside Bosch. To expand attendees' experiences past the time of their visits, Bosch added the opportunity to opt in for more Power Tour-based content via online training modules. By 2019, the Power Tour had expanded into a total of about 20 markets, including Denver, Seattle, and Minneapolis. With thousands of workers made safer by its traveling education and hitting 125 percent of its sales goals to distributors in markets visited, Bosch showed it was the sharpest tool in the shed. E