THE ROLE OF MARKETING COMMUNICATIONS IN GENERATING BRAND EQUITY FOR AN EVENT

Marketing academics and businesses consider the creation of brand equity to be fundamental for differentiating products and achieving competitive advantage. Marketing communications controlled by the organization are considered a fundamental antecedent of brand equity. However, the impact on brand equity of traditional and online communications created by and communications external to an organization have been studied separately in the literature and to the best of our knowledge no works have jointly analyzed various communication instruments controlled by and external to a company in the area of event tourism. This study therefore aimed to analyze the influence of brand communications controlled and not controlled by the organization on forming brand equity for an event and to estimate the impact of overall brand equity on satisfaction and behavioral intentions of attendees of the event. Focusing on the main live music festival in Spain and with a sample of 622 attendees, evidence was obtained on the effectiveness of using brand communications on the event to generate brand equity that will help to inform decisions of managers of live music festivals regarding investment in instruments for communicating the event.