Investigating Consumer Motivations to Participate in Marketing-Events

Wohlfeil, Markus and Whelan, Susan (2004) Investigating Consumer Motivations to Participate in Marketing-Events. In: Proceedings of the 7th Irish Academy of Management, 2-3 September 2004, Trinity College Dublin.

[thumbnail of Investigating_Consumers'_Motivations__IAM04.pdf]
Preview
PDF
Investigating_Consumers'_Motivations__IAM04.pdf

Download (82kB) | Preview

Abstract

In recent years, due to an increasing saturation and fragmentation of markets and the subsequent competition of communications, marketers are confronted with the decreasing effectiveness of their classic marketing communications (Wohlfeil and Whelan 2004). As a consequence, event-marketing has become a popular alternative for marketers that creates 3-dimensional brand-related realities by staging marketing-events, in which consumers are actively involved on a behavioural level (Zanger and Sistenich 1996). However, as a pull strategy within marketing communications, event-marketing strategies must be designed in a way that consumers are motivated to participate voluntarily. Thus, marketers must have an understanding of the needs consumers seek to satisfy by participating in marketing-events. As consumer behaviour in affluent societies is largely driven by the intrinsic pursuit of happiness and enjoyment of life right here and now (Opaschowski 1998) to compensate for the deficits in consumers’ everyday lives (Mitchell 1988), event-marketing is setting up the stage for consumers to experience flow (Drengner 2003), to take on roles that differ from their everyday lives (Sistenich and Zanger 1999) and even become part of the social community that they associate with the brand (McAlexander et al. 2002) or the event-content (Bauer et al. 2003). However, while previous research in event-marketing focused in detail on its effectiveness (Drengner 2003; Lasslop 2003; Nufer 2002), consumers’ predispositional involvement and their motivations to participate in marketing-events, which is crucial to the subsequent communicative success, has not been addressed in literature so far. To narrow this information gap, this research has developed a conceptual framework of how event-marketing works by proposing that consumers’ motivations to participate in marketing-events are determined by at least one of four types of predispositional involvement, which represent the long-lasting personal relevance of either the event-object (brand), the event-content (dramaturgy), event-marketing (communication strategy) or social interaction (brand community) for the consumer.

Item Type: Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Departments or Groups: Waterford Crystal Marketing Studies Group
Divisions: School of Business > Department of Management and Organization
Date Deposited: 16 Feb 2007 12:39
Last Modified: 22 Aug 2016 10:25
URI: https://repository.wit.ie/id/eprint/298

Actions (login required)

View Item View Item