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The purpose of this paper is to introduce the term branded marketing events (BMEs), and examine the role of its experiential components as a strategic tool for the facilitation of customer brand engagement. This study examines five experiential components of BMEs at events held in Australia and France to determine their respective impact on customer brand engagement.

Surveys were distributed to attendees of ten events by six wine brands in South Australia, and six events in five sub-regions of Bordeaux.

Findings suggest that BMEs influence customers’ brand engagement and brand purchase intention in both Australia and France. However, the experiential components within the events had differing effects. Australian customers were influenced by cognitive, sensorial, and relational experiences and their increased customer brand engagement strongly influenced brand purchase intention. French customers, however, required pragmatic event experiences to build brand engagement.

Recognizing their mutual experiential and interactive foundations, this study integrates the research domains of marketing events, customer experiences and customer brand engagement, and contributes to the strategic understanding of how branded event experiences facilitate customer brand engagement.

This study aims to explore how brands use brand personification techniques in real-time marketing on social media, particularly Twitter, and examine how these techniques impact consumer engagement, moderated by brand-event congruence levels.

Data included 464 tweets posted by 95 brands around three large events in 2019. The types of brand personification techniques and the level of brand-event congruence applied by the tweets were content-analyzed, and regression analyses were conducted to examine their linkages to consumer engagement metrics.

Results confirmed the use of diverse personification techniques in brands’ real-time marketing tweets as in the previous literature. The study also revealed a new personification technique, tacit expression, not reported in previous literature. The study also showed that the overall effectiveness of multimedia-based (vs caption-based) personification techniques in increasing consumer engagement on social media was greater, but their relative effectiveness varied depending on whether or not the event was functionally congruent with the brand.

The findings offer valuable suggestions to brand managers regarding prioritizing brand personification techniques and aligning brands’ social media marketing with real-time events to maximize the effectiveness of real-time marketing in boosting consumer engagement.

This research offers insights into the dynamic effects of different brand personification techniques in the new context of real-time marketing, extending the scope of literature on brand personification and anthropomorphism. The revelation of a new type of brand personification not captured in the extant literature is also a significant contribution.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of how the city of Dubai branded itself as a major event holder for sustainable sporting events in the Gulf Region.

The paper uses both academic and trade literature as well as key informant interviews to demonstrate how Dubai can sustain its position as a choice for sustainable sporting events. The study evaluates the use of a portfolio of major sport events for place event marketing of Dubai. Both primary and secondary data were used. The secondary data was collected from a range of event reports, media and journal articles. The primary data featured a qualitative design of key informant interviews with sport, tourism and event stakeholders in Dubai.

Dubai hosts a wide array of major international sport events, with many of them recurring annually. The key success factors that have positioned Dubai as a globally competitive sport destination are tourism attractiveness, good event management and the diversity of events hosted in the region. However, the sustainability aspects are considered to be a contemporary topic to promote these events and are sometimes neglected from the perspective of event organisation. Some of the challenges experienced in supporting such a wide portfolio of major sport events are examined.

Insufficient key informant interviews were a major limitation for the data collection process. The key informant interviews were sent out to more than 30 key stakeholders however it was not possible to get their responses in time for our paper. A second limitation was the lack of first-hand observation on the sporting events’ sustainability practices. This study could be extended in future by incorporating a bigger set of primary data, event observations and a cross comparison between other Gulf Cooperation Council countries.

It is recommended that empirical insights on social and commercial aspects of sustainability are sought in future studies. It is also recommended that investigations be conducted with the residents of Dubai concerning their perceptions of sustainability practices of sport events.

The paper also highlighted the importance of key success factors that have helped to position Dubai as a globally competitive sustainable sport destination as well as some of the challenges experienced in supporting such a wide portfolio of major sport events.

This study takes a closer look at the challenges of communication as well as the sustainability of sport events in branding of Dubai.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the application of event design principles in the creation and execution of effective experiential sponsorship activations (ESAs) by B2B brands and examine the challenges posed by the sponsorship context to sponsors seeking to create ESAs, with proposed potential solutions.

A case study of Cisco’s ESA activities as part of its London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games sponsorship activation is developed, drawing on interviews with key Cisco employees and secondary sources of data, both internal and external to Cisco.

Blending the event design principles typically associated with B2B events with those more commonly found in corporate hospitality or B2C events enables sponsors to address the cognitive needs of attendees as business representatives, while also satisfying their needs as individuals seeking more sensorial experiences. Effective use of event design principles, creative marketing and promotion, and collaboration with other sponsors allow brands to overcome constraints placed on them by the unpredictable nature of sponsorship, sponsorship rights agreements and the increased clutter in the sponsorship environment.

Existing knowledge on sponsorship activation is extended, drawing on principles of event design to offer a sponsor-focused perspective on the creation and execution of effective ESAs for B2B brands. Existing thinking around B2B event design is challenged and augmented when considering its application to ESA design.

Inter-sponsor collaboration and the blending of cognitive and sensorial elements of event design are important for sponsors seeking to create and deliver effective ESAs.

The paper draws on the event design literature to appraise the execution of ESA by B2B brands within the context of event sponsorship.

The purpose of this paper is to extend the understanding the role of consumer experiences, instantiated through gift giving and game play, in communication of brand values.

The paper is based on in-depth phenomenological interviews of marketing managers and various channel intermediaries involved in the execution of a mass brand promotion program in rural India.

The study reveals the employment of innovative game designs and gift choices, their design rooted deep in the village populace’s context and life experiences. It shows how the consumer’s experience created through games and gifts shapes their perceptions about the brand leading to favorable consideration and purchase outcomes for it.

This work is derived primarily from practice. It is hoped that industry practitioners will benefit from this stream of research and will use games and gifts in innovative ways to engage customers and create brand experiences.

This is one of the first works to highlight the importance of games and gifts in experiential marketing literature. It brings into focus one of the largely unexplored facets of customer engagement in rural India.

The purpose of this paper is to study the effects of sports sponsorship on brand equity using two managerially related outcomes: price premium and market share.

This study uses a best–worst discrete choice experiment (BWDCE) and compares the outcome with that of the purchase intention scale, an established probabilistic measure of purchase intention. The total sample consists of 409 fans of three soccer teams sponsored by three different competing brands: Nike, Adidas and Puma.

With sports sponsorship, fans were willing to pay more for the sponsor’s product, with the sponsoring brand obtaining the highest market share. Prominent brands generally performed better than less prominent brands. The best–worst scaling method was also 35% more accurate in predicting brand choice than a purchase intention scale.

Future research could use the same method to study other types of sponsors, such as title sponsors or other product categories.

Sponsorship managers can use this methodology to assess the return on investment in sponsorship engagement.

Prior sponsorship studies on brand equity tend to ignore market share or fans’ willingness to pay a price premium for a sponsor’s goods and services. However, these two measures are crucial in assessing the effectiveness of sponsorship. This study demonstrates how to conduct such an assessment using the BWDCE method. It provides a clearer picture of sponsorship in terms of its economic value, which is more managerially useful.

Online influencers are increasingly used by brands around the globe to establish brand communication. This study aims to investigate the characteristics of social media content in terms of presentation style and brand communication among online influencers in China. The authors identified how characteristics of social media posts influence young consumers’ engagement with the posts.

The authors analyzed 1,779 posts from the Sina Weibo accounts of ten top-ranked online influencers by combining traditional content analysis with Web data crawling of audience engagement with social media posts.

Online influencers in China more frequently used photos than videos to communicate with their social media audience. Altogether 8% and 6% of posts carried information about promotion and event, respectively. Posts with promotional incentives as well as event information were more likely to engage audiences. Altogether 22% of the sampled social media posts mentioned brands. Posts with brand information, however, were less likely to engage audiences. Furthermore, having long text is more effective than photos/images in generating likes from social media audiences.

Combining content analysis of social media posts and engagement analytics obtained via Web data crawling, this study is, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, one of the first empirical studies to analyze influencer marketing and young consumers’ reactions to social media in China.

The purpose of this paper is to test the applicability of brand personality theory in the perspective of trade show events, and the influence of trade show event personality on exhibitor’s eudaimonic and hedonic happiness and advocacy intentions.

A total of 210 exhibitors (n=210) of three trade exhibitions, organized at Delhi, India participated in the study. A face to face survey method was used to collect the data.

The results of the study provide sustenance for the event personality and exhibitor’s eudaimonic and hedonic happiness model. The event personality factors significantly affected the meaningful and subjective happiness of exhibitor. Happiness was identified as a key influencer for advocacy intentions. Hedonic and eudaimonic facets of happiness had positive effects on exhibitor’s intention to participate, and word of mouth intention.

The current study provides event marketer a tool for measuring event personality. Event personality is vital to build the event equity and to position the event in the market to gain a competitive advantage over the other events. Happiness as a construct is being studied in various social science studies. This study has attempted to establish a relationship among exhibitor happiness, event personality, and advocacy intentions.

This study contributes to the management literature in two ways: first, Eudaimonic and hedonic happiness constructs have never been explored in the brand personality context. Thus, this research adds a new value to the brand personality literature. And second, the brand personality construct is used for the first time in trade show event context that will open a new domain in brand personality, and event research.

This paper examines ambush marketing activities and their effects upon UK football-oriented consumers. It questions previous definitions of ambush marketing and proposes one more relevant for today. The research focuses upon the identification of 'event-connected brand recognition' achieved by sponsor versus ambush brands and the role of 'event involvement' as a driver of this. The research employs a pre- and post-event design that aims to track consumer recognition of predesignated brands. Results give initial indications that consumers can discern differences between the two forms of activity and that high event involvement increases recognition. This paper contributes towards the debate about a change in the definition of ambush marketing against the backdrop of increasing media saturation surrounding major sporting events, and suggests that a more relevant descriptor would be 'parallel event marketing'.

The paper aims to explore a major issue in international marketing: how to build a global brand in a way that makes a strong local connection.

Using qualitative research methods on a single case, the Brisbane Goodwill Games, the processes used in the staging of this major sport event are analyzed. In particular, the stakeholder relations employed by the marketing department of the Goodwill Games Organization are investigated and a process model is developed that explains how a global brand can be built locally.

A major outcome of the paper is a revision to the four‐step Freeman process to make it more proactive; and three major principles for effective stakeholder management are articulated. The findings demonstrate that stakeholder analysis and management can be used to build more effective event brands. Stakeholder theory is also proposed as an appropriate and possibly stronger method of building inter‐organizational linkages than alternatives such as network theory.

Previous literature has generally dealt with the global brand issue in terms of the standardization versus adaptation debate, and the extent to which the marketing mix should be adapted to meet local needs in foreign countries. This research provides a unique extension to this literature by demonstrating how the brand itself needs to be modified to meet local needs.