COMMITTEE CHAIR: Dr. Erick Kitenge

TITLE: BEYOND EXECUTION: MANAGERIAL ATTRIBUTES FOR SUCCESSFUL EXPERIENTIAL MARKETING

ABSTRACT: This study examines the relationship between what consumers value in experiential marketing events and the managerial competencies organizations seek when hiring for experiential marketing roles. As brands increasingly compete on emotional and sensory engagement, the experiential marketing manager has become central to execution, yet the role remains loosely defined, and the skills it demands are rarely tied to what audiences respond to. This research addresses that gap by asking which event attributes consumers prize most, which respondent characteristics shape those preferences, and what competencies employers actually ask for when they hire the managers who build these experiences. Survey data were collected from 521 consenting respondents drawn from a university campus community, and the importance of twelve experiential attributes was modeled using ordered and binary logit regressions grounded in the Theory of Planned Behavior, with the Kano Model used to interpret how those attributes function for consumers. The findings show that demographics explain little about how consumers evaluate experiences. Age and gender were largely insignificant, while frequency of engagement and the lived quality of the experience were the consistent drivers, and the relational dimension of an experience, follow-up engagement and personalization, was what converted attendance into brand recommendation. Emotional connection, the outcome the field treats as its goal, ranked last as a stated feature yet was reported by a majority of attendees when asked directly, behaving as a latent quality that consumers do not consciously demand. A separate content analysis of 28 experiential marketing job postings, coded inductively against a competency framework built from the posting language itself, found that employers ask overwhelmingly for execution, coordination, strategy, and measurement, and least often for the emotional and relational competencies most tied to how an experience feels. Read side by side, the two datasets reveal a gap in emphasis between what consumers reward and what employers hire for. Identifying and defining that gap is the contribution of this study, which offers a theoretical framework and practical guidance for defining and staffing the experiential marketing role and leaves the causal testing of the gap to future research.

Keywords: Experiential marketing, managerial competencies, consumer expectations, Kano Model, Theory of Planned Behavior, job postings

Location Online:

Zoom Link:

https://pvpanther.zoom.us/j/94370460503?pwd=eWtiMDlNTDRmbVBLZlNVa0JzOE4wUT09