Like being a Guinness drop in a freshly-poured pint: Consumer motivations to participate in the Guinness Storehouse

Due to the decreasing effectiveness of class marketing communications, event-marketing has enjoyed a growing popularity across Europe among marketers and customers alike. While event-marketing strategies in earlier years were primarily built around marketing-events, brand lands have nowadays become a popular and more permanent alternative. The Guinness Storehouse in the centre of Dublin is such a brand land, which was designed to reconnect the Guinness brand with an increasingly alienated younger target audience and to rejuvenate the brand image. The current study investigates what exactly motivates over 1 million consumers each year to experience the hyperreality of the Guinness brand by feeling oneself like a drop in a freshly-poured pint of Guinness. Using Wohlfeil and Whelan’s (2006a) conceptual model, four predispositional involvement dimensions are identified and tested to what extent they predicted the situational involvement in the Guinness Storehouse and the subsequent motivation to participate. The surprising results are then discussed.