Consumer marketing scholars keenly emphasize a proposed paradigm shift toward interactive

relationships and lived brand experiences. Yet, little has been done to investigate the link

between the two. Until now. This study is an attempt to measure the effects of lived brand

experiences on consumers’ perceived relationship with a brand, through testing an

academically established brand relationship quality model onto the concept of experiential

event marketing.

Susan Fournier’s (2000) brand relationship quality scale was chosen as the construct to be

tested in the experiential event marketing context. It was through a theoretical argumentation

hypothesized that the experiential event intervention would produce positive direct effects

within the scale, but that these would decline with time. This was consequently tested through

a repeated measurement study, set at an experiential food truck event hosted by the Swedish

FMCG brand Santa Maria. Respondents were to rank their perceived brand relationship

quality with the brand on three different occasions; directly before, directly after, and two

weeks after being exposed to the experiential event. This way, not only the immediate effect,

but also the effect over time, could be measured.

It could be concluded that all but one constructs produced positive direct effects, but only half

of them were significant. In all cases but one this effect declined significantly when being

measured two weeks afterwards, and went in several cases back at approximately the same

level as in the initial measurement. These findings have important implications for both

academics and practitioners. Most notably, we argue that the link between lived brand

experiences in form of typical FMCG experiential events and strengthened longer-term brand

relationship quality can be invalidated.