An exploratory study looking at the relationship marketing techniques used in the music festival industry

Abstract

There are current issues and trends in the music festival market, which may affect the success of an event, and market saturation is at the forefront of these issues. Previous literature, maintaining the need for a marketing approach to festivals, identifies the need for maintaining strong stakeholder relationships in order to succeed in a business environment; attention has been focused to the theory of relationship marketing (RM) because of the recognition that this practice is complementary to the marketing of festivals. The very nature of the music festival as an annual, usually, 4-day event means that effective marketing is needed to keep connections with the consumer throughout the year. This article focuses on the RM techniques utilised within the music festival industry from the viewpoint of the festival organiser in an attempt to establish how festival organisations value and monitor organisational relationships. This article explores the extent to which these relationships are valued and managed; furthermore, the variations between these intricate relationships are considered by focusing on those held with the organisation's consumers and sponsors, the results of which have provided the ability to establish the importance and relevance of RM to the industry and further identify the marketing communication methods employed to establish and maintain such relationships. In-depth, convergent interviews have been conducted with a segment of music festival organisers from a range of events. The results have been integrated with the study of current literature to best exemplify these issues. It has been established that RM has a strong role in today's commercial and independent music festival industry; technological advances are enabling the organiser to support online relationships further and increase consumer loyalty. There is a need to expand the research further because of the complexity of organisational relationships and the varying categories of festivals.