When Brands Become 'Real-Lived' Experiences: Consumer Motivations to Participate in Event-Marketing Strategies

Due to significant changes in their marketing environments and in consumer behaviour, marketers are confronted with the decreasing effectiveness of their classic marketing communications and in need of new ways to position their brands in consumers' minds. As a consequence, event-marketing is becoming increasingly popular alternative for marketers to communicate with their target audiences on a behavioural level. Event-marketing is defined as the staging of interactive marketing-events as 3-dimensional hyperreal brand experiences for consumers, which would result in their emotional attachment to the brand. Indeed, the major pecularity of event-marketing in comparison to classic marketing communications is that consumers are encouraged to experience the brand by becoming an active part of its hyperreality, because nothing is more convincing than personal experiences. However, as a pull strategy within marketing communications, the effectiveness of event-marketing strategies is highly dependent on consumers' voluntary participation. This means that an in-depth understanding of consumers' experiential needs and their intrinsic motivations is essential for the design of successful event-marketing strategies. Therefore, the objective of this research is to investigate why consumers participate voluntarily in marketing-events that are specifically designed to communicate the same commercial messages these consumers would usually avoid. In doing so, this study expands the previous research by identifying and investigating the motivational drivers in the pre-event stage that determine the voluntary participation of consumers in marketing-events. A total framework of how event-marketing works is developed in this study. Particular emphasis is placed on presenting a model of how consumers' predispositional involvement in the event-object, event-content, event-marketing and the social interaction at events determine their involvement in the marketing-event and, subsequently, drive their motivation to participate. The proposed model is tested in a quasi-experimental survey of students at WIT in relation to two research objects (Adidas Predator Cup and Guinness Storehouse) by using Pearson Correlation, bivariate regression analysis and finally backward stepwise regression analysis as a powerful multivariate data analysis technique.