Markus Wohlfeil

Event-Marketing as Innovative Marketing Communications: Reviewing the German Experience

As a result of significant changes in their marketing environments and in consumer behaviour, marketers are confronted with the decreasing effectiveness of their classic marketing communications (Kroeber-Riel 1984) and, consequently, in need of new ways to position their brands in consumers’ minds. Because nothing is more convincing than personal experiences (Nickel 1998), event-marketing creates new brand-related realities by staging marketing-events with which consumers interact. This would result in an emotional attachment to the brand (Zanger and Sistenich 1996). However, while event-marketing as an experience-oriented marketing communication strategy has become very popular among German marketing professionals and academics, researchers and marketers in English-speaking countries have widely ignored this innovative communication strategy so far due to a different understanding of the term (Cornwell 1995). Nevertheless, some European companies have successfully launched in recent years their first event-marketing campaigns in Ireland, the UK and the US, suggesting a much broader appeal than previously recognised. Thus, this paper is introducing event-marketing to an international audience by outlining its constitutive features and discussing its role in marketing communications, based on the lessons learned from the German experience, that are presented using mini-case studies.

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.