Event Engagement: Using Event Experiences to Build Brands

Abstract

Companies invest considerably in event experiences; however, many are criticised for hosting events without understanding the full extent of their impact, or how to optimise their design. To benefit from event experiences, it is critical to consider not only how customers engage with the event, but also how event engagement transfers to engagement with the host brand to ultimately drive brand loyalty. This paper empirically explores the role of customer event engagement in facilitating brand engagement, within the context of branded marketing event experiences. Surveying attendees of such branded event experiences, six Australian wine brands, running 10 diverse events, agreed to collaborate in the research, yielding a total response of 274 participants. Results indicate that, for emotional, sensorial, pragmatic and relational experiences, event engagement fully mediates the relationship with customer brand engagement. Furthermore, it is the engagement with the host brand, rather than engagement with the event, that facilitates the effect on behavioural intentions of loyalty. These findings suggest that viewing engagement with a single focus (i.e., only event or only brand engagement) provides limited insight and does not uncover the true impact of event experiences; it is only through exploring the interrelationships between the engagement foci that we can truly understand how event experiences impact behavioural brand loyalty. This offers important managerial implications to facilitate engagement transfer (i.e., between event and brand), while drawing on associative network theory to explain how customer engagement spills over from the event to the brand and better account for the interdependence across engagement objects.