Purpose 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. Design/methodology/approach 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 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. Originality/value 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.

Student engagement in the classroom is well recognised as crucial for student success; however, the importance of engaging students beyond the classroom, in the broader university context, is often overlooked. This study examines how students engage with the university through their interactions with other students, conceptualised as ‘social brand engagement’. Orientation events provide opportunities for students to interact in a way that is facilitated by, and relevant to, the university. This study investigates the role of four experiential components (intellectual, affective, behavioural, and sensory experiences) in facilitating social brand engagement and the subsequent effect on word-of-mouth behaviour. We surveyed 223 students across 10 orientation events held at an Australian university. Path analysis indicates that intellectual, sensory and behavioural experiences have a significant impact on social brand engagement, which in turn positively impacts word-of-mouth behaviour. Thus, this study utilises the construct of social brand engagement, establishes its antecedents and outcomes, and demonstrates its relevance for higher education management.

Marketers and event organizers have long viewed sponsorship as a way to fund events and garner public attention for brands. Recent years has seen brands employ event techniques in their own right, with specific intent of more directly influencing the consumer's attitude toward the brand. We propose a conceptual framework for how those events affect consumers across the range of “typical” consumers that attend events. This is done through proposing a typology of experiential involvement that demonstrates the likely impact an event will have on a consumer; events are categorized as educational or entertainment. Combining the typology with event types we propose a hierarchy of effectiveness for researchers and practitioners to consider and further research.

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.

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