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The aim of this opinion piece is to seek to cast a critical eye over the event studies field to chart its progress as an emerging area of study, relative to its close relations tourism, hospitality and leisure.

Viewpoint approach.

The paper highlights various challenges that event educators and researchers face in advancing event studies to discipline status.

It is timely that, as the quantum of event research and the number of event management education programmes surge, those involved in the field engage in greater critical introspection. This opinion piece attempts to provide such a reflective insight, which has been largely absent from the event studies literature to date.

Social media has fundamentally changed the consumer decision process, and in the last decade a more nuanced view of how consumers engage with brands has emerged. Instead of the traditional purchase funnel, consumers research products and services during an extended evaluation stage, and after purchase, they often enter into an open-ended relationship with the brand, sharing their experience with it using social media. This paper describes the new consumer decision journey, and then adds to the body of research on events and festivals management by applying this new model to events and festivals.

The study uses a case study methodology with a multi-method approach to analyze the use of social media at three major music festivals. Case studies offer depth and comprehensiveness for understanding a specific phenomenon, enabling inductive and rich description, and are specifically welcome in new situations where little is known about the phenomenon.

In general, the music festivals profiled are proactive in their use of social media, engaging with consumers throughout the consumer decision journey. In particular, social media is making the “evaluate” and “advocate” stages of the decision journey more relevant for festival marketers.

This paper provides an illuminating view of the use of social media in an event and festival context. It supports the theory previously developed in this area, and is further evidence of the powerful impact that new technology can have on consumer behavior. The results have important implications for both researchers and practitioners interested in the marketing of festivals and events.

The purpose of this paper is to debate on community engagement and participation in local community festivals and events by empirically analysing the factors which either inhibit or facilitate engagement. The application of the motivation-opportunity-ability (MOA) model to the analysis of community festivals is an important contribution.

Recognising the complexity associated with community participation in festivals produced a set of four research questions which are addressed via a mixed methodology research design. The model was then tested using four key data collection methods including the interviews and the questionnaires analysed within this paper.

The MOA model can be seen as an appropriate framework with which to analyse community engagement in a local community festival setting, in the case of “The Utcazene-Fesztival”, a Street Music Festival in Veszprém, Hungary. Community participation is often interpreted quite simply as a way of involving local people in community planning and development. However, within the realm of community festivals and events the reality reveals a multitude of stakeholder webs and interconnected decision-making processes within a multi-faceted phenomenon. The paper reflects on the value of the MOA model to guide analysis within event studies and further considers the methodological challenges that the study brings to events studies.

This paper presents two key data sets as part of a broader study of the MOA model. Due to size restrictions only the primary data derived through qualitative interviews and quantitative questionnaires are analysed here.

Currently there is limited understanding, agreement and research within community engagement remains an increasingly important area of academic enquiry. This particular paper explores the central concepts of inclusivity and engagement which can be considered as fundamental to the creation of successful community festivals and events. The paper begins by defining community festivals and events; it builds on Jepson and Clarke's (2012) work on developing inclusive community festivals and events through inclusive participation within the planning and decision making process.

The purpose of this study is threefold. The first is to discuss the practice of corporate hospitality (CH) at special events used by Australian businesses as a relationship marketing technique to engage with their customers. The second aim is to investigate how marketing practitioners judge their CH programmes in a business-to-business (B2B) context. A third aim is to determine the key benefits and uncover contemporary issues faced by marketing practitioners in the operation of CH programmes.

A qualitative method was employed in this the first phase of a broader research programme. The research design sought to attain exploratory insights from marketing executives that employed CH at sports and cultural events as part of existing B2B marketing programmes. The intention of this qualitative study was to investigate and uncover key issues and establish themes that could be tested in future research. Fifteen in depth interviews including a pilot of two interviews were conducted with marketing practitioners who held managerial responsibility for CH programmes in four states of Australia. These interviews were electronically recorded and subsequently transcribed for coding purposes.

An analysis identified several key issues regarding the role and deployment of CH within marketing programmes. Key benefits of programmes included gaining market intelligence, improving channel communication and creating a competitive advantage through building existing relationships with a firm's customers. The research found that there were specific differences within both the application and management of CH among practitioners and highlighted several pressing issues regarding the practice. Events offering mass appeal to both genders such as tennis and horse racing were considered more appealing to a corporate audience and spectacular, big-ticket events were favoured. The research identified that no two organisations operate their programmes identically, some use the programmes to reward past loyalty and others leverage special events for face-to-face time with new clients. The lack of consistency in measurement included an inability to disengage CH programmes from other marketing elements operating simultaneously. It was evident that the lack of objective setting by many organisations coupled with often a short-term view of CH programmes impeded effective measurement of expected outcomes.

This exploratory study provides greater insights into the little researched topic of CH in the special events sector. Implications stemming from the study include the implementation of recommended changes to CH design and delivery including optimising special event selection to match intended guests and their preferences, setting micro and macro objectives for CH programmes and ensuring they are measurable. In addition, such objectives need to be made explicit to internal stakeholders in order to maximise return on investment for marketing practitioners. For CH to continue to grow as a major revenue stream for special event organisers, more certainty with regards to the outcomes of these programmes are required, along with ensuring the CH special event products offer corporate appeal.

The purpose of this study is first to describe and discuss an innovative strategy, pursued by a music festival, to reduce the environmental impact by allowing only vegetarian food in the festival area. A second aim is to discuss the effects of the vegetarian strategy for the festival in terms of branding and communication impacts. A third aim is to assess the effect on the ecological footprint of the festival from the vegetarian food strategy.

Festival visitors’ food consumption was surveyed in 2010 (719 responses) and again in 2012 when only vegetarian food was served on festival premises (663 responses). The EPA event calculator, developed in Australia, was used to calculate the ecological footprint of the festival. The implementation and the impacts were studied from the festival organisers’ perspective through two (one hour long) interviews with one of the festival managers.

For the festival brand, the vegetarian strategy proved to be extremely successful in terms of media attention and an enhanced “green” image of the festival. An analysis of the environmental impact of the vegetarian strategy indicates a remarkable drop of 40 per cent in the size of the ecological footprint.

Based on the results of this study, a vegetarian strategy can be recommended as an innovation for festivals that have core values and a brand image grounded both in sustainability and the reduction of environmental impacts and that are truly concerned about the environment.

Festival Footprint Analysis.

In order to understand the future of organised events and festivals it is necessary to understand the patterns of change associated with their consumption. This viewpoint paper identifies ten significant consumer trends derived from global omnibus data as key social forces likely to affect the behaviours and actions of future festival and event goers.

The trends data has been sourced from http://nvision.futurefoundation.net/, an online consumer omnibus survey of households worldwide.

The author identifies ten trends of significant importance which represent the present and future behaviour's of festival and event goers.

Derived from this viewpoint, an enhanced understanding of what the future could be, and the forces influencing it, provides festival and event organisers with the potential to shape that future. This paper identifies trends of significance in order to inform future decision making.