PART I ‐ DEFINING EXPERIENTIAL BRANDING
9 E XPERIENTIAL BRANDING THROUGH EVENT MARKETING
9.2 Consumer motivations to participate in marketing events
In Whelan and Wohlfeil (2006b) the authors seek to define the relevant aspects in determining consumer motivations to participate in marketing events. Initially they argue that consumer motivation to participate in various leisure activities is determined by their personal interests and desires, creating a degree of involvement with the given activity. Due to the experiential similarities between leisure activities and real lived experiences at marketing events, they argue that consumers’
degree of involvement with the marketing event determines their motivation to participate. In this regards the authors distinguish between situational and predispositional involvement as the building blocks of motivations, where situational involvement in an object is defined as a level of involvement that becomes apparent when confronted with a given object or theme. Predispositional involvement on the other hand is defined as a “long‐lasting interest in engaging with an object based on
[consumers’] personal values and desires” (Wohlfeil and Whelan 2006a; Wohlfeil and Whelan
2006b)(Whelan & Wohlfeil, 2006b pp. 127), which does not disappear once a need has been fulfilled.
The authors argue that, for a consumer to be motivated to participate in a marketing event she/he must become situationally involved in the event when becoming aware of its existence and that this situational involvement is based on a predispositional involvement. To illustrate this with an
example, a predispositional involvement dimension could be football, which a person will likely be involved with over an extended period of time. The person will likely not be thinking of football at all times, but when becoming aware of an event based on football, this predispositional involvement becomes situational, and hence according to Whelan and Wohlfeil (2006b) elicits a motivation to participate. Alternatively a person looking to buy a new house will be situational involved with buying or financing of such and may well be motivated to participate in a house‐
financing/buying/valuation event. However, once this person has bought a house the situational involvement will likely disappear and since no predispositional involvement with these aspects exists, the person would hence not be motivated to participate at an event at this point.
Based on a literature review, the authors propose that the following predispositional involvement dimensions could provide the basis for the situational involvement with the event (Wohlfeil and Whelan 2006b):
• Event‐marketing – being long term involvement with the concept of event marketing e.g.
from a professional point of view as a marketer.
• Event‐object – being long term involvement with the brand or product around which the event is centered.
• Event‐content – being long term involvement with the activity/performance central to the event e.g. an interest in football in relation to Carlsberg’s “Vores Cup”.
• Social event involvement – being long term involvement in the form of a desire to belong to or socialize with a certain social group relating to either the brand or the event content, e.g.
when football enthusiasts seek the company of their likeminded peers at an event like
“Vores Cup”
The authors summarize these propositions in the framework illustrated in fig. 9.2 and further include the consumer’s “ability to participate” as a moderating factor influencing the actual participation at events given an established motivation from the consumer.
In order to validate the relationships between predispositional involvement dimensions, involvement in the event and motivation to participate, Whelan and Wohlfeil (2006a) conducted an experimental study with 120
respondents from an Irish university, testing the relationships between each of the above
predispositional involvement dimension, and the situational involvement with a hypothetical Adidas football event. Further, the authors tested the relationship between a situational involvement with the event and the proposed subsequent motivation to participate. The results showed that all the above mentioned propositions, except predispositional event marketing involvement, were significant predictors of the situational involvement with the Adidas event. Predispositional involvement with the event content being the strongest predictor, followed by predispositional involvement with the brand, and social event involvement proved to be only a minor/supplementary predictor (although still significant). Finally regression analysis showed that the situational
involvement with the Adidas event, spurred by predispositional involvement with one or more of the three predispositional involvement dimensions explained 68,4% of the variance in motivation to participate in the event. The validity of these results is influenced by the fact that the respondents,
Fig. 9.2 – Consumers’ motivation to participate Source: Whelan and Wohlfeil 2006a pp. 129
being only university students, were neither representative for the general population nor the potential target group of Adidas, whereby we deem it to be only satisfying. This mere satisfactory level of validity of course weakens the generalizability in the same manner, however not in a degree that renders the results unusable. This we argue is due to the fact that despite the uniformity of the respondents they will either have a motivation to participate or not and they either will or will not be predispositionally involved with one or more of the dimensions.
These results, and those of the above described study of effectiveness, are highly relevant in relation to experiential branding campaign planning. Primarily, the results indicate that staging real lived experiences has definite brand equity building potential, and further that predispositional
involvement with the brand and the event‐content are the two main predictors for the motivation to participate in the event. This is consistent with moderating effect of “relevance” in the program quality multiplier in the brand value chain as this affects the potential for building brand equity.
This means that in planning experiential branding campaigns the members of the target group’s predispositional involvement in leisure activities must be central in choosing event content, and further that there is a fit between this event content and the brand. The relevancy of this last aspect is essential to building brand equity, due to a need for credibility, as mentioned in section 7.2 regarding the CBBE model and brand value chain. This need for credibility can be evaluated in terms of the perceived authenticity of the brand as being truly part of a given event‐content “world”, and will be described further in chapter 10 below.
Despite the benefits in terms of potential effects on brand equity of event based marketing as argued above, there are limitations to its use, as it will the vast majority of cases not be able to achieve the same reach in terms of participants as a campaign run solely in the traditional media. However, as we have argued, the effects on brand equity of experiential branding campaigns will in virtually any case be stronger that those elicited by traditional advertising alone. Thinking in terms of conversion rates in the CBBE model, the effects of experiential branding will elicit a significantly higher percentage of participants going from one level to the next, which naturally moderates the inherent reach
limitation. Further, the company can seek to share the experience of the event with the non‐
participating share of the target group, in order to try and build (although weaker) brand equity with this group. We will analyze this further in section 15.1.2