I've seen great festival aftermovies and when a colleague
from Brazil posted one on her Facebook page, I started thinking about the impact
these videos have on consumer behaviour. Although I am not fanatic about
electronic music, one cannot avoid being affected by the energy and happiness that
is conveyed by the movie (shown below).
One natural reaction is "those lucky buggers" or "I wish I could
have been there" or even "That's it! I am going next time". So,
what mechanism are we talking about? FoMO - ‘Fear of Missing Out’.
As the events industry continues to grow, it is
imperative that event organisers are aware and up to date of the motivations
that drive consumers to attend events. The ‘Fear of Missing Out’, is a
relatively new concept, but more ‘attuned’ marketers are now starting to
capitalise on FoMO appeals, if anything because social media has heightened the
sensation that everyone is having fun but us and therefore people are more
sensitive to FoMO appeals. Besides more subtle strategies such as aftermovies, I
have noticed that companies are using FoMO explicitly (e.g. The Croatia Summer
Salsa Festival was using it last year).
This year I had the opportunity to review a paper
on this topic and also to supervise a dissertation on FoMO. The issue of FoMO
also came up in some research about prestige in events that I am currently
writing about. The student who has recently finished her dissertation on the
topic (Ellie Taylor) recognised that at present
little is understood about the ‘FoMo’ as a concept. She then sought to investigate
the mechanisms associated to the ‘Fear of Missing Out’ and to establish a
connection between the ‘FoMo’ and an individual’s motivation to attend an
event. She did a qualitative study involving eight ‘Generation Y’ participants.
A key finding identified the specific ‘negative
feelings’ experienced by individuals which causes them to experience the ‘FoMo’.
Specific emotions included (with sample quotes to illustrate each emotion):
- Jealousy/Envy – e.g. “I’m jealous of them all getting together and having loads of fun without me” // “I feel jealous; when they all talk about it I don’t wanna hear about it…”.
- Anxiety - e.g. “…I get anxious about the thought of that night because I know exactly what I’ll be feeling if I don’t go...”.
- Anger/Frustration – e.g. “[I felt]… Kind of angry because it was frustrating that they could go and I couldn’t”.
- Annoyed/Upset – e.g. “Upset, yeah really, really upset…” // “When like I saw the pictures from Bournemouth sevens and I was just sat at work bored I guess I just found it really annoying”
- Excluded - “I just remember feeling really left out…” // “…I just didn’t feel like part of the friendship group anymore…I just felt like I wasn’t part of something like I didn’t belong with them as a friendship group”
- Regret – e.g. “I don’t wanna miss them because I know I will regret it once Uni is over and I look back at my time”.
- Guilt – e.g. “…even though it was out of my control I felt I had to justify why I wasn’t going to the girls and I dunno [pause]… I just felt as though they thought I was just bailing on them but it really wasn’t that at all”.
As humans we don’t like to feel negative emotions
and therefore we develop strategies to avoid feeling them. These avoidance
emotions are powerful triggers of behaviour and a second significant key finding
discovered in the study relates to the fact once an individual has experienced
the ‘FoMo’, they can react in four different ways:
- Attend the next event – e.g. “Well, it just kind of motivated me more to make sure I would go to Bestival this year” // “…so I just made sure that this year I definitely booked it off, even if I didn’t decide to go this year I just wanted to have the option of going and the freedom to choose to go”.
- Look on social media – e.g. “…I couldn’t stop myself from looking, like in a weird way you want to see what you’re missing out” // “…looking without looking if that makes sense, like they would come up on my news feed but I would try not to look at them but still I wanted to see what everyone was wearing [...] if they looked as though they were having a good time”
- Post on social media - “…because I knew I was missing out on a night out, I started to take loads of pictures to make it look as though I was having a really good time at work, when actually I was really bored [laughs]” // “I think I do that a lot with pictures and stuff like you just want to show off when you look nice and make out that your life is so fun [laughs]”
- Arrange another event – e.g. “…after ascot, I wrote to all the girls in our whatsapp group and arranged another night, we just had like a dinner round mine and it was really nice”.
By establishing a clear connection between the
‘FoMo’ and event motivation, Ellie’s dissertation made a very good contribution
to knowledge (Who says we don’t learn anything from students?). I think that her dissertation is helping to develop this exciting area of marketing that is emerging.
Based on her results, the area definitely warrants further research and I hope more students (and researchers) end up looking at this topic.
PS: if you want to cite the results of the dissertation, cite as:
Taylor, Ellie (2015), An investigation into the ‘Fear of Missing Out’ as a
motivation to attend events, Unpublished undergraduate dissertation, Faculty of Management, Bournemouth University, UK
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