Green the Crowd. Communicating Sustainability through Open Air Music Festivals (PDF)

Master's Thesis from the year 2012 in the subject Business economics - Offline Marketing and Online Marketing, grade: 1,0, Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg (Fakultät II: Informatik-, Wirtschafts- und Rechtswissenschaften), course: Sustainability, Economics and Management, language: English, abstract: "People come in their millions upon millions to our shows and we have the enviable position of a captive and receptive audience.
We are in a position to champion causes, highlight issues
and inspire changing behaviour."

(Event Professional Meegan Jones 2010: vi)

What do you have in mind, when you hear music festival? Do you think on the first representatives, like Woodstock, as a movement of love and peace against the confrontational direction of the world leaders? Or, more likely, do you think of young adults hanging around without any political intentions? Festivals today are more popular than ever in Germany, but lack the revolutionary spirit of their meaningful ancestors.

But thereby is mankind confronted with the greatest challenges, which indeed are communicated by politicians and business leaders, but not satisfactorily tackled. Weather extremes all over the world remind menkind, with increasing frequency, of the strong dependence of human activities on climate conditions. Climate change has already begun and it looks like it will affect the living generation. These are self-made problems, because they concern those who emit more and more carbon dioxide and use so much of the natural resources that the available amount shrinks drama¬tically (see Sachs 2008: 19 et seq.).

With the rising public awareness for sustainability the companies' interest to include the topic in their communications strategy has increased, which is also true for the Music Event Industry branch. But while many companies are concentrated rather on green washing than acting like that, some encouraged sustainability efforts do not become public after all, although marketing communication provides a valuable tool for the strategic positioning and is able to inspire people to modify their consumption behaviour (see Meiländer 2011: 52).

Hence, this master thesis attempts to explore, by taking the example of Open Air Music Festivals, how an applied target group specific Sustainability Communication (SC) concept needs to be designed to reach the customer and influence them towards a more sustainable behaviour.