Event Marketing in Your Marketing Job

For people in marketing jobs, event marketing has come to stay. Event marketing involves promoting brand or business interests by associating with a social activity. Event marketing may or may not be sponsored, though the most visible forms of event marketing still require sponsorship. While sponsorship involves payments to an individual or organization, event marketing involves staging events to associate with activities conducted by an external entity, with or without payments. Event marketing has become popular with people in marketing jobs because it provides direct consumer interaction while achieving the brand's communication goals.


When it comes to choosing between different modes of marketing communications or developing a proper mix for integrated marketing communications, people in marketing jobs are often bewildered. Eric Einhorn, in a 2004 study published in the Journal of Advertising Research, put the problem quite succinctly when he wrote:

We follow our own marketing communications 'disciplines'—advertising, direct marketing, event marketing, on-line marketing, and public relations. And to confuse the marketer even more, these disciplines have traditionally positioned themselves in a competitive context as 'the answer' to building brands—almost as though the others do not exist—each with a different 'philosophy' or secret of success: advertising builds brands by creating desire. Relationship marketing builds brand through one-to-one relationships. Event marketing builds brands by allowing consumers to experience the brand. All of this is true, but each discipline tends to claim just a little more of the business building credit than it really deserves. (And of course they look the other way when things do not quite work out right.) ("How to Fill the Accountability Gap in Demand Creation," Journal of Advertising Research)


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