Speaker: Professor Daiane Scaraboto
Title: Mega-Event, Mega-Impact? How Social Atmospheres Create Imbalanced Value Systems
Date: Thursday, 16 October 2025
Time: 10:00am – 12:00pm
Venue: Building 26C, CBE, 248, Allan Barton Forum
Anna Hartman is the host of this visitor
Abstract:
At the core of the experience economy—encompassing mega-events in areas like sports, music, and religion—lies a managerial and consumption paradox: while these events create social atmospheres that deliver value (e.g., emotional and economic benefits) for participants and other stakeholders, they also produce detrimental environmental impact. Extant marketing research provides limited guidance to managers on how to design collective experiences that provide value to multiple stakeholders while minimizing the environmental damage social atmospheres may cause. We address this gap through an extensive qualitative study of two mega-events, the religious pilgrimages of Círio de Nazaré and Juazeiro do Norte in Brazil. Our findings reveal that social atmospheres involving multiple stakeholders can lead to an imbalanced value system, characterized by a set of value processes (value creation, destruction, waste, and recapture) with outcomes unevenly distributed among stakeholders over time. Social atmospheres lead to imbalances in value systems through four key mechanisms associated with different stages in the creation of social atmospheres: (1) exclusion of certain stakeholders during preparation; (2) masking of supportive service potential during activation; (3) impeding multi-focal attention during climax, and (4) suppression of post-experience awakening in the recovery stage. These findings extend the literature on social atmospheres by showing how their collective, embodied, and experiential nature can interfere with value creation. We provide actionable recommendations for firms, policymakers, and NGOs to design social atmospheres that minimize value destruction and waste, and facilitate value recapture, thereby rebalancing the value system.
Bio:
Daiane Scaraboto is a Professor of Marketing at the Faculty of Business and Economics, at the University of Melbourne, and a 2024 Marketing Science Institute (MSI) Scholar. Her research challenges taken-for-granted market notions such as value, exchange, and access, by examining how consumers collaborate, instigate market change, and engage with sustainability challenges. She has published influential research on the top journals in marketing and consumer research. Daiane is currently serving as Associate Editor at the Journal of Consumer Research and International Journal of Research in Marketing, and is an editorial review board member at the Journal of Marketing. In 2024, Daiane and her co-authors received the AMA-EBSCO-RRBM Annual Award for Responsible Research in Marketing.