Date of Award

8-2026

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Business Administration (DBA)

Degree Discipline

Business Administration

Abstract

This study examined the relationship between what consumers value in experiential marketing events and the managerial competencies organizations seek when hiring 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 addressed that gap by asking which event attributes consumers prized most, which respondent characteristics shaped those preferences, and what competencies employers asked for when they hired the managers who built these experiences.

Survey data were collected from 521 consenting respondents drawn from a university campus community, and the importance of 12 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 showed that demographics explained little about how consumers evaluated 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 asked overwhelmingly for execution, coordination, strategy, and measurement, and least often for the emotional and relational competencies most tied to how an experience felt. Read side by side, the two datasets revealed a gap in emphasis between what consumers rewarded and what employers hired for. Identifying and defining that gap was the contribution of this study, which offered 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, experiential marketing and managerial competencies, experiential marketing and consumer expectations, Kano Model, Theory of Planned Behavior, job postings

Committee Chair/Advisor

Erick Kitenge

Committee Member

Elvis Ndembe

Committee Member

Qiang Fei

Publisher

Prairie View A&M University

Rights

© 2021 Prairie View A & M University

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Date of Digitization

9/14/2026

Contributing Institution

J B Coleman Library

City of Publication

Prairie View

MIME Type

Application/PDF

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