Emotional interactions in festivals How do consumers build a collective emotional experience

Abstract

Music festivals are factors of attractiveness for territories. As such they are part of their tourism strategies (Getz, 1991). In France, 84% of the 2018 music festivals took place during the touristic summer season. They sometimes even become a tourist product in itself like Tomorrowland Winter in Alpe d’Huez, a ski resort in the French Alps. During seven days, the ski resort is only accessible for the festival-goers. In 2019, Alpe d’Huez was fully filled with 23,000 tourists from 131 different countries who booked their holidays to enjoy skiing and concerts during that special event, and 36,000 people were on the waiting list. Provoking a spatio-temporal rupture with everyday life (Chaney, 2011), significant in leisure or tourist practices, festivals allow experiencing a real re-enchantment of the world and everyday life. According to the postmodern approach, the phenomenon of society around festivals, illustrated by the growth in festival demographics (in the number of participants but also in the number of events) (Négrier et al., 2013), can be considered in the global context of a return to festive alchemy and the cult of pleasure, with a powerful return to affect and emotion. This festival craze is significant for the “triumph of the collective will to live over the individual” (Maffesoli, 2012: 115). However, this collective dimension of emotions has received limited attention in marketing (Didry & Giannelloni, 2019). In addition, although accompaniment has often been analyzed in consumer behavior (Debenedetti, 2003), few studies consider the collective context in which consumers are immersed in their experience. If a festival experience is lived in a collective way, which behaviors do festival consumers develop to engage in emotional interactions with others? The challenge here is to bring a new reading of the experience of collective consumption through emotional transfers to fill a gap in the marketing literature. More specifically, it is a question of assessing how the need for emotional interactions will influence the festival-goer’s behavior.