Experiential Engagement: A Scale for Experiential Contexts

Experiential Engagement: A Scale for Experiential Contexts

Summary

This paper develops and validates a short, unidimensional scale to measure “experiential engagement” across varied experiential contexts (e.g., sport, music, arts). Drawing on a systematic review of 25 context-specific engagement scales (466 items), the authors identify three recurring facets underlying contextual engagement: behavioural involvement, intimacy, and influence. They adapt existing items to produce a concise six-item scale and test its psychometric properties and nomological validity across four studies (lab, field, and online samples) covering general sport, music, track and field, and sponsor-brand outcomes.

The scale demonstrates strong convergent and discriminant validity (CFA results), reliable composite scores (CR > 0.80), and consistent nomological relationships: individual antecedents (motivation, identification, psychological involvement, exposure) predict experiential engagement, which in turn predicts downstream cognitive and behavioural outcomes (context knowledge, fantasy sports, betting, willingness to pay for premium streaming). In a large online sample, experiential engagement explains more variance in sponsor brand equity and word-of-mouth than an involvement scale or a single-item fandom measure.

Key Points

• Experiential engagement is defined as the product of cumulative and ongoing behavioural and emotional exposure, involvement, and interaction with a definite observable context.
• Three theoretical facets underpin the construct: behavioural involvement (participation/exposure), intimacy (emotional/parasocial connection), and influence (advocacy and social impact).
• The authors adapted items from 466 existing context-specific items to build a compact six-item, reflectively specified scale intended to be generalisable across contexts.
• Four empirical studies (student lab, music lab, field track-and-field sample, and a large online sample) support the scale’s unidimensionality, reliability, and nomological validity using CFA and SEM techniques.
• Experiential engagement predicts managerially relevant outcomes (e.g., betting/fantasy behaviour, music knowledge, willingness to pay) and sponsor brand outcomes (brand equity and word-of-mouth).
• The six-item scale explains more variance in sponsor brand outcomes than an eight-item sport involvement scale and a single-item sport-fandom measure.
• Methodological strengths include a systematic literature review (PRISMA), item-reduction protocol, coder agreement checks and multiple sample types; limitations include US-only testing and English-language literature review.
• Practical implication: brand managers and researchers can use a short, generalisable measure to compare engagement effects across experiential investments and sponsorship portfolios.

Why should I read this?

Short version — if you work with events, sponsorships, influencer or placement strategies and you ever wonder which contexts actually move the needle, this paper gives you a tidy six-item gauge you can drop into surveys. It saves you hunting disparate context-specific measures and lets you compare engagement across music, sport and niche events. Nice and practical, no fuss.

Context and relevance

The work matters because contemporary marketing increasingly leverages experiential contexts as platforms for embedded communication. Without a generalisable engagement measure, firms compare apples and oranges across sponsorships or placements. This scale lets researchers and practitioners control for or explicitly test the role of context engagement when evaluating brand activations, sponsorship ROI, or cross-property strategies. It’s especially relevant for sponsorship managers, experiential marketers and academics studying contextual effects on brand outcomes.

Author’s take (Punchy)

Punchy: This is a lean, empirically solid tool that stops you guessing. The six items capture the nature of engagement — not the specific content — so you can compare contexts and link engagement to real actions and brand metrics. If you care about evidence-based sponsorship spend, stick this measure into your next survey.

Limitations & next steps

Developed from English-language literature and tested in US samples, the scale still needs cross-cultural and multilingual validation. The authors also encourage testing in more narrow and diverse experiential settings to map any boundary conditions.

Source

Source: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/mar.70026?af=R