Branded marketing events: the influence of event experience on customer engagement.

This thesis investigates the role of branded marketing events (BMEs) in facilitating customer engagement. As business environments become more dynamic and interactive, customers are seeking participation through unique experiences with brands (Vivek, Beatty, and Morgan 2012), and hence customer engagement has emerged as an important concept in academe. Previous research has demonstrated that customer engagement is highly impactful in enhancing customer-brand relationships (Brodie, Hollebeek, Jurić, and Ilić 2011a), however, there has been little research exploring the antecedents that facilitate customer engagement. This thesis proposes that BMEs can be used as strategic tools to facilitate engagement with an event, with engagement transferred to the brand and ultimately resulting in enhanced behavioural intention of loyalty. A quantitative online survey was conducted in the South Australian wine industry to investigate how experiential components of a BME contribute to both customer event engagement and customer brand engagement. The impact of BME experiences on behavioural intention of loyalty, and the moderation effect of experiential needs are examined through structural equation modelling. Results indicate that customer event engagement has a mediating effect on the relationship between BME experiences and customer brand engagement. Sensorial, relational and pragmatic experiences are found to only impact customer event engagement, while cognitive experience has a direct impact on customer brand engagement. This highlights that the heightened state of engagement can transfer between focal objects; from the event to the brand. This provides further insight into the BME’s impact on customer brand engagement and behavioural intention of loyalty. In addition, support is found for the inclusion of a social dimension of customer brand engagement, and partial support for a social dimension of customer event engagement. Therefore, results of this thesis suggest that BME experiences facilitate customer engagement and subsequent behavioural intention of loyalty. The moderating influences of the individual’s experiential needs, namely need for cognition, need for affect, and novelty-seeking needs are also examined. There is evidence that attendees with a strong need for cognition engage more strongly with relational BME experiences, while attendees with low need for cognition engage more strongly with sensorial BME experiences. However, few moderating effects are identified overall. This research empirically demonstrates the strong and positive relationship between BMEs and customer engagement, and advocates the use of BMEs as an effective brand-building activity. This thesis contributes to the knowledge of customer engagement through identifying engagement transfer between two focal engagement objects, and provides support for the inclusion of a social engagement dimension. The findings provide support for the BME activities that managers undertake with the intention of facilitating customer engagement and providing brand-related outcomes through such endeavours.Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, Business School, 201