POSTGRADUATE PAPER
Marketing-Track: Competitive Paper
EVENT-MARKETING:
WHEN BRANDS BECOME
“REAL-LIVED” EXPERIENCES
Markus Wohlfeil
Waterford Institute of Technology
Cork Road, Waterford
Ireland
Phone: +353 87 654 87 02
Fax: +353 51 302688
E-mail:
Susan Whelan
Waterford Institute of Technology
Cork Road, Waterford
Ireland
Marketing-Track Competitive Paper
EVENT-MARKETING:
WHEN BRANDS BECOME “REAL-LIVED” EXPERIENCES
By
Markus Wohlfeil and Susan Whelan
Waterford Institute of Technology
Abstract
Whether one agrees or disagrees with the philosophical idea of postmodernism and its value for marketing practice (Brown 1994), there is no denying that a number of the conditions proposed by Firat (1991) determine consumer behaviour and the way of doing business in today’s affluent societies (Cova and Cova 2002; Patterson 1998). Indeed, due to the majority of industries increasingly reaching a state of saturation in recent years, many products have matured to such an extent that they can no longer be distinguished on their quality and functional benefits alone (Weinberg 1993; Kroeber-Riel 1984). Subsequently, the role of brand management has already shifted from providing a “mere” means of identification towards creating brand identities and communicating brand visions through the addition of sign values and meanings (de Chernatony 2001; Weinberg 1992). However, the reliance of marketers on identical symbols and sign values has resulted in standardised, interchangeable brand communication designs (Weinberg and Gröppel 1989) and comparable claims that are pushed through the same channels, blurring any existing brand distinctions even further (Schmitt 1999; Kroeber-Riel 1984). Therefore, the emphasis of branding should be placed on stimulating hyperreal experiences for consumers to meet the changing needs in affluent (postmodern) societies.
As a pull strategy, event-marketing offers marketers an innovative approach in marketing communications that meets those conditions. By staging marketing-events, consumers are encouraged to experience the brand values and vision as a 3-dimensional hyperreality (Wohlfeil and Whelan 2005a). In other words, similar to a theme park the brand identity is turned into a “real-lived” multi-sensual experience. Because personally “lived” experiences tend to be stronger in determining consumers’ notion of reality than the “second-hand” experiences traditionally communicated by advertising (Weinberg and Nickel 1998), event-marketing is better equipped to anchor multi-sensual brand experiences in the world of consumer feelings and experiences (Weinberg and Gröppel 1989). By meeting consumers’ growing need for experiential consumption in affluent societies, they make a genuine contribution to their perceived quality of life (Wohlfeil and Whelan 2005b, 2004). But is it just another postmodern craze or an exciting new way for marketers to communicate brand values to consumers in affluent societies?
Therefore, the objective of this paper is to introduce the concept of event-marketing to a broader audience and to discuss its role within marketing communications as well as its impact on the changing communications landscape. By presenting empirical evidence from a qualitative field experiment at the Guinness Storehouse in Dublin, the paper will outline how brands can be communicated as experiential 3-dimensional real-lived experiences, which would strengthen the emotional attachment to the brand by developing and implementing creative event-marketing strategies. Consequently, the findings will narrow the information gap by increasing the perceived fit between consumers’ experiential needs and a brand’s contribution to their quality of life.
Marketing-Track Competitive Paper
EVENT-MARKETING:
WHEN BRANDS BECOME “REAL-LIVED” EXPERIENCES
By
Markus Wohlfeil and Susan Whelan
Waterford Institute of Technology
INTRODUCTION
Life has become very tough for marketers. The times when consumers happily bought their products and services once they were offered on the market are definitely over now (If they have ever really existed, but that is a different story…). Indeed, technological advances in recent decades have not only led to improving living standards in the industrialised world at large, but also to the saturation and fragmentation of an increasing number of industries in affluent Western societies (Levermann 1998). Market share can only be increased or even held at the expense of competitors. Furthermore, many products have matured to such an extent that they can no longer be distinguished on their quality and functional benefits alone (Weinberg 1993; Kroeber-Riel 1984). Subsequently, the emphasis of branding has shifted from providing a “mere” means of identification towards creating brand identities through the addition of sign values and meanings (de Chernatony 2001; Weinberg 1992). Thus, brands are supposed to provide marketers with the basis upon which consumers can differentiate between similar offerings (Andersson and Weslau 2000) and subjectively experience a contribution to the quality of life (Weinberg 1995). Unfortunately, in many cases marketing managers have lacked the creative imagination and necessary courage to develop a unique communication proposition for their brands (Bruhn 2003) and relied instead on the same symbols and sign values as their competitors. As a consequence, any existing brand distinctions have been blurred even further (Schmitt 1999; Kroeber-Riel 1984) by interchangeable brand communication designs and comparable claims (Weinberg and Gröppel 1989) that are pushed through the same marketing channels and communication media (Wohlfeil and Whelan 2005a). However, bombarded with approx. 3600 selling messages on any given day (Rumbo 2002; Kroeber-Riel 1987), consumers respond to the growing information overflow with a general low advertising involvement while actively engaging in a variety of avoidance strategies at the same time (Wohlfeil and Whelan 2005a; Tse and Lee 2001).
And as if this is not enough for marketers to deal with, consumers have changed their ways in recent years as well by becoming more and more fickle, unpredictable and increasingly “immune” to common marketing practices (Brown 1995). Indeed, the growing affluence in industrialised societies is having profound residual effects on the societal value system and its dominant consumption ethic. In particular, the shift from maintenance consumption (the compulsory shopping for necessities) towards experiential consumption (shopping as a pleasurable end in itself) is exemplifying the current drift towards a romantic consumption in Western societies, where the emphasis on living your life right here and now (Campbell 1987). Social trends, such as increasing orientation towards leisure and recreation as well as a desire for individualism, are leading to significant changes in consumer behaviour (Opaschowski 2000; Schulze 2000; Firat and Shultz 1997; Cova 1997). Whether one agrees or disagrees with the philosophical idea of postmodernism or its value and implications for marketing practice (Brown 1999, 1994), there is no denying that a number of the conditions proposed by Firat (1991) determine consumer behaviour and the way of doing business in today’s affluent societies (Brown 2002; Cova and Cova 2002; Patterson 1998). Those conditions, which are briefly discussed in this paper, include among others the fragmentation of mass-markets, the age of the (self-)image by mixing playfully elements of existing styles and blurring distinctions between high and low culture (Cova 1996), the nostalgic preoccupation with the past (Brown 2001; Holbrook 1995) or the search for hyperreal experiences (Opaschowski 2000; Schulze 2000).
Therefore, as (in the spirit of management guru Tom Peters) crazy times call for crazy and creative measures, marketers need to consider the design of marketing strategies that provide consumers with a platform where they can experience brands in a way that contributes to their subjectively perceived quality of life. In other words, the emphasis of branding should be placed on stimulating hyperreal experiences for consumers to meet the changing needs in affluent (postmodern) societies (Whelan and Wohlfeil 2005). In light of these demands, event-marketing has already become an increasingly popular alternative for marketers in Continental Europe. Event-marketing is defined in the context of this paper as the staging of interactive marketing-events as 3-dimensional hyperreal brand experiences for consumers, which would result in an emotional attachment to the brand. Thus, consumers are actively involved on a behavioural level as participants and encouraged to experience the brand values multi-sensually in a 3-dimensional hyperreality. Furthermore, as a pull strategy within marketing communications, the participation of consumers is voluntarily and subsequently not perceived as an invasion of privacy as it is the case with classic marketing communications. In fact, the irony is that consumers participate on their own free will in those brand hyperrealities, even though they are specifically designed to communicate they same commercial messages they usually tend to avoid (Whelan and Wohlfeil 2005).
This, however, leads inevitably to the question: Is event-marketing just another postmodern craze or is it an exciting new way for marketers to reach their target audiences in the changing marketing communication landscape of affluent societies? Why should marketing managers should stretch their creative imagination to the limits to create and stage unique brand hyperrealities for consumers, when it would be much easier, convenient and “less risky” to exploit the commercial propriety of an existing external event (event sponsorship)? And, anyway, why should marketers care about making a contribution to consumers subjectively experienced quality of life, when their primary concern and sole purpose should be to sell products and to make profits for their shareholders (Friedman 1970/2001)? Thus, the objective of this paper is to introduce the concept of event-marketing first to a broader audience and then to discuss its role within marketing communications as well as its impact on consumers in the changing (postmodern) marketing communications landscape. As a consequence, the research obviously raises some key academic and managerial implications. By presenting empirical evidence from a qualitative field experiment conducted at the Guinness Storehouse in Dublin, the paper will outline how brands can be communicated to both external and internal target audiences as 3-dimensional real-lived experiences, which would strengthen the emotional attachment to the brand, and how marketers can build mutually beneficial customer-brand relationships by using their imagination in the development and implementation of creative event-marketing strategies. The findings will not only narrow the identified information gap, but also demonstrate how the staged brand hyperreality could contribute to consumers’ subjective quality of life as an enchantment of experiential consumption.
EXPERIENTIAL CONSUMPTION AND THE POSTMODERN COMMUNICATION LANDSCAPE
As already mentioned in the first sentence of this paper, today’s life has become extremely tough for marketers, as in the words of Bob Dylan the times they are a-changing. The irony is, however, that marketers have actually afflicted the majority of those conditions upon themselves by the very own marketing practices they have employed over the past century. In addition to their contribution to the fragmentation of markets, the competition of communications and the increasing information overflow through growing advertising clutter stated earlier, an even more significant implication is the change in the societal value system as a residual effect of technological progress and the growing material wealth of the overall population (Fanning 2001; Schulze 2000; Campbell 1987). Indeed, Levermann (1998) argued that an increasing number of saturated and fragmented markets reflect a strong indicator for the wealth of any given society. However, increasing affluence also means that consumers are able to satisfy their existential and utilitarian needs via the accumulation of material possessions without any major difficulties and subsequently turn their attention to the more enjoyable pleasures of life (Csikszentmihalyi 2000). Thus, most affluent Western societies have witnessed a major shift in their societal value system from maintenance consumption towards experiential consumption (Wohlfeil 2005; Opaschowski 2000). While maintenance consumption refers to the rational decision-oriented purchase of products for their utilitarian value in solving perceived problems, experiential consumption refers to obtaining enriching emotional experiences through shopping as an enjoyable recreational and social activity (Wohlfeil and Whelan 2005a). This means that shopping has become an end in itself, while the purchase is little more than a by-product - a small part of the bigger emotional experience.
But because marketers are primarily concerned with market share and sales figures, they have paid very little attention to the interests and perspectives of their customers and subsequently failed to notice those developments. Indeed, despite their persistent claims to the opposite in anything from mission statements to advertising and other kinds of public announcements (in the line of “We are in the business of giving the customers what they want.”), in reality customers are treated in business reports as nothing else but impersonal (homogeneous) markets determined by demographic, socio-economic or psychological segmentation variables (Holbrook 1995). Thus, it is not surprising that marketers often regard consumers merely as automated buying machines that can be programmed or even manipulated in accordance to their specific needs. This also means that marketers’ interest in people’s consumption is narrowed down to the tiny moment of the buying process, while the primary concern of consumers in consumption actually lies in the emotional experiences obtained during the usage of the product (Holbrook and Hirschman 1982). To point out the differences between the perspectives of consumers and marketers on consumption, Morris Holbrook (1995) told in his book Consumer Research: Introspective Essays on the Study of Consumption the story of Hattie as an analogy for a consumer’s daily experience with marketing practice. In this story, Hattie is the devoted housekeeper of Miss Lee and has lived for all her life on Miss Lee’s rural plantation. As the aging Miss Lee moved to a small apartment in Baltimore to be close to her doctor, Hattie went with her. However, she soon found it difficult to adapt to the city life and was finally driven over the edge as the newspaper boy asked her to be paid for the delivery of the Baltimore Sun newspaper. In tears, she complaint to Miss Lee:
O, Miss Lee, I can’t stand it no more. Back home, when I needed eggs, I just went to the hen house and grabbed a few; now I need to place an order with the poultry man and wait 2 days. Back home, when I wanted milk, I could just go out to the barn and get me some from the cow; now I have to call the dairy company and pay them to come and bring it. Back home, when I had to fix vegetables for supper, I could just go out to the garden and pull some up right out of the ground; now I have to carry a shopping basket and a pocketbook full of money all the way down to the grocery store. And now – Lord, Lord – there’s a boy down there at the front door who says he’s here to collect for the sun. (Holbrook 1995, p. 172)
Despite Hattie’s obvious misunderstanding of the boy’s request, this analogy still reflects the underlying contrast between both perspectives in general. However, consumers have not only a stronger interest in the consumption experience per se rather than in purchase decisions, but in affluent societies they are also more interested in using the newly gained wealth in time and money to enjoy their lives right here and now. In this context, Campbell (1987) and Opaschowski (2000) already spoke about a drift towards a romantic consumption ethic that has its origin in Rousseau’s philosophical work Emile:
Teach him to live rather than to avoid death; life is not breath, but action, the use of our senses, our mind, our faculties, every part of ourselves which makes us conscious of our being. Life consists less in length of days than in the keen sense of living. A man may be buried at a hundred and may have never lived at all. He would have fared better had he died young.
(Rousseau 1762/1993, p. 11)
Although recent research and managerial practice has placed a certain emphasis on the satisfaction for the experiential dimension of consumer behaviour (Whelan and Wohlfeil 2005; de Chernatony 2001), marketers need to develop a deeper understanding of consumer behaviour that addresses the consumption process outside their own immediate sphere of interest (i.e. sales volume, shelf space, etc.). In addition, marketers must also appreciate the consumer as an individual human being with his/her very own perceptions, thoughts, feelings and interests rather than as just another number in a statistic or a name in a database (Brown 1998; Holbrook 1995). A good way to start is to have a look at the postmodern marketing conditions identified by various authors in literature (i.e. Patterson 1998; Firat and Shultz 1997; Firat and Venkatesh 1995; Brown 1995, 1994; Firat 1991). One need not necessarily agree with the philosophy of postmodernism as such. But it would not hurt either to examine whether one or another condition might offer some interesting opportunities. There are already a number of success stories of companies who kept an open mind and established themselves among consumers as an integral part in the postmodern society of the spectacle (Schulze 2000; Firat and Venkatesh 1995).
The problem that most people have with the concept of postmodernism and postmodern marketing is its deliberate lack of a precise definition of what it actually entails (Brown 1999, 1995). On the other hand, there is an agreement among postmodern marketing scholars on a number of specific conditions that reflect the postmodern culture (Patterson 1998; Firat and Shultz 1997; Firat 1991). The first major condition is fragmentation, where all things, moments and experiences are disconnected and disjointed in their representation from each other, their heritage, history and contexts. In a culture that depends on the representation of individual images and symbolic meanings, each representation reflects an emotional instance based on intensity, form, style and technique. In practice, each product that an individual consumes fulfils a specific need, which is fragmented from and even independent of the others (Firat and Venkatesh 1995). As a result, postmodernism reflects a lack of commitment to any single style, fashion, idea or grand design. Instead, the emphasis is on the image or perception of what the individual objects/subjects and their elements mean rather than on what they actually contain or do. Thus, Cova (1996) was speaking of postmodernism as the age of the image.