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The purpose of the study is to compare features of career development and fandom in frequent festival attendance in the context of Finnish music festivals.

The study uses a mixed methods research approach and employs two theoretical frameworks: theories of career development and fandom.

In frequent festival attendance, both festival career development and festival fandom are most clearly present in motivation development and social dimensions.

Strategically, frequent festivalgoers should be considered as crucial stakeholders, who might mobilize the co-creation of a sense of community or festival brand.

Music-related fandom has been previously investigated in relation to artists and specific musical genres, but not so much in relation to music festivals in general. Career studies, on the other hand, concentrate heavily on sports events. There is a scarcity of research scrutinizing both career development and fandom in the festival context within the same study, and festival attendance as part of music tourism is an under-researched area.

To explore the value in reminiscing about past festivals as a potential way of improving wellbeing in socially isolated times.

The paper uses previous research on reminiscence, nostalgia and wellbeing to underpin the analysis of self-recorded memory narratives. These were gathered from 13 pairs of festivalgoers during Covid-19 restrictions and included gathering their individual memories and their reminiscences together. The participant pairs were a mix of friends, family and couples who had visited festivals in the UK, Finland and Denmark.

Four key areas that emerged through the analysis were the emotions of nostalgia and anticipation, and the processes of reliving emotions and bonding through memories.

Future studies could take a longitudinal approach to see how memory sharing evolves and the impact of this on wellbeing. The authors also recommend undertaking similar studies in other cultural settings.

This study findings have implications for both post-festival marketing and for the further development of reminiscence therapy interventions.

The method provides a window into memory sharing that has been little used in previous studies. The narratives confirm the value in sharing memories and the positive impact this has on wellbeing. They also illustrate that this happens through positive forms of nostalgia that centre on gratitude and lead to hope and optimism. Anticipation, not emphasised in other studies, was also found to be important in wellbeing and was triggered through looking back at happier times.

Since effective and successful branding increases the popularity and loyalty of the festival, and its economic success factors like positive media coverage and sponsors’ interest, it is essential that the festival brand image is credible and strong. The purpose of this paper is to focus on interpreting audience’s perceptions on a rock festival brand image to find out the factors that influence the brand image of the festival and how organisers could contribute to it.

Critical Incident Technique (CIT) was used in defining the factors influencing a rock festival brand.

The attending public co-produce the festival brand, and the brand image was created by the festival community where the importance of social and inclusive behaviour towards strangers was essential.

The data were collected as a voluntary response sample which led to a biased sample. Another limitation is that the informants were asked to describe only positive incidents.

The festival brand image cannot be produced solely by organisers; rather, volunteers, artists and especially audience members are crucial for the success and creditability of the brand. This should be considered in marketing and event management.

The use of CIT in the festival brand image evaluation introduces new possibilities in the field.

The purpose was to examine the prevalence and type of inappropriate behaviour gender minorities face and how they perceive such behaviour. The study is framed within Gidley et al.’s social inclusion model, indicating areas where actions are needed to avoid social exclusion.

The research data comprised over 12,000 responses to a web survey, which included 184 responses from gender minority members and four in-depth, semi-structured interviews. The data were analysed using statistical methods and interpretative phenomenological analysis.

About 59% of gender minority members had experienced inappropriate behaviour, compared to 34% of female festival attendees. The most common form of inappropriate behaviour towards gender minorities was harassment because of gender, followed by sexual harassment, physically threatening situations and harassment because of appearance or clothing. Interviews were analysed against the theoretical framework of social inclusion, determining how the experiences influenced access, participation and empowerment.

Festivals must have unisex toilets. Safer space policies should be better communicated, more visible and more practical. Instead of having one harassment contact person, there should be a whole team. Training the festival personnel, particularly the security staff, is highly important. People are reluctant to report problems to the security personnel since those personnel might be part of the problem. There should be members of gender minorities among performers, workers, security staff and volunteers.

Studies on inappropriate behaviour at festivals have concentrated on female experiences of sexual harassment. Gender minorities have hardly been studied, even though they face more inappropriate behaviour than any other minority group. Furthermore, gender minorities are typically grouped with sexual minorities even though their experiences differ from one another. We applied Gidley et al.’s hierarchical model of social inclusion to gender minority members in the context of music festivals. In doing so, we added knowledge of attitudes and practices that reduce and endanger feelings of access, participation and empowerment.

To make sense of the relationship between the festival attendance and the aims in arts festival management, the purpose of this paper is to explore the key characteristics for success and analyze the perceptions of the future in arts festival productions.

This qualitative study uses interviews with festival managers and empathy-based stories (MEBS) written by members of festival audience. Discourse analysis is employed for answering the questions: What are the characteristics of a successful festival, and what could ruin it?

The paper highlights the importance of interaction with the audience orchestrated by the festival organization. Such interaction co-constructs a more holistic festival experience valued by both parties, which supports the sustainability and future success.

The research data are limited to one country, and music festivals dominate the data.

Among managers, there is a need to consider audiences as consumers and as producers in the current competitive climate in the arts and cultural field and clarify the role of the audience as a partner in the networked festival production by placing the attendee at the core of the strategic planning process of arts festivals.

The research combines the views of the demand-and-supply side. It adds to the knowledge in arts and festival management by exploring the relationship between attendance and the aims of arts festival management in general, and the key characteristics of success in the arts festival context in particular. MEBS offers new interesting opportunities for future research in qualitative festival research.

This study aims to explore how emotionally rich collective experiences create lasting, shareable memories, which influence future behaviours. In particular, the role of others and of music in creating value through memories is considered using the concept of socially extended emotions.

Over 250 narratives were gathered from festival attendees in the UK and Finland. Respondents completed a writing task detailing their most vivid memories, what made them memorable, their feelings at the time and as they remembered them, and how they shared them. The narratives were then analysed thematically.

Collective emotion continues to be co-created long after the experience through memory-sharing. The music listened to is woven through this extension of the experience but is, surprisingly, not a critical part of it. The sociality of the experience is remembered most and was key to the memories shared afterwards. The added value of gathering memorable moments, and being able to share them with others, is clearly evidenced.

The study highlights the importance of designing events to create collective emotional moments that form lasting memories. This emphasizes the role of post-experience marketing and customer relationship building to enhance the value that is created customer-to-customer via memory sharing.

The research addresses the lack of literature exploring post-event experience journeys and the collective nature of these. It also deepens a theoretical understanding of the role of time and sociality in the co-creation and extension of emotions and their value in hospitality consumption. A model is proposed to guide future research.

The purpose of this paper is to unfold factors anchored in visitors’ experiences possibly determinant of the success or failure of cultural festivals.

The studied data included 931 experience descriptions, 23 interviews and 51 empathy-based stories collected from 17 cultural festivals around Finland during the summers of 2012 and 2013. The nature of the study was exploratory, the theoretical framework was social constructionism, and the analysis was done using Foucauldian discourse analysis. The Method of Empathy Based Stories, a non-active role-playing technique, was used in the data collection.

The identified success factors were the programme, good quality food, sense of community, chill-out opportunities and building blocks of one’s identity. The factors that might cause failures were commercialised and low-quality programme, the low quality of services, commercialism demonstrated by elevated ticket and service pricing, VIP services confronting egalitarianism, crowd control and queueing and anti-social behaviour.

Three areas of particular interest were: how to nurture identity construction and personal well-being, how to enhance egalitarianism within the festival community, and how to promote the desired code of conduct without applying unnecessary rules and restrictions. If successful in these, the festival could boast of features that are not easy to replicate and that could create a competitive edge.

Empathy-based stories combined with discourse analysis contributed new insights on the issues of the success and failure of festivals. The empathy-based stories were particularly useful in retrieving informants’ perceptions of the future and for identifying factors that might cause failures.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether immigrants, when in the minority, are more exposed to bullying at work than natives, and whether immigrants’ cultural distance from the host culture increases the risk of being bullied.

The study was conducted as a cross-sectional survey. The participants were immigrant (N=183) and native (N=186) employees in a transport company in Finland.

Whereas immigrants on average were more likely than natives to label themselves as being bullied, the culturally least distant group of immigrants did not differ in this regard from natives. Compared to natives, the risk of being bullied was nearly three times higher in the intermediate distance group of immigrants and nearly eight times higher in the culturally most distant group. The primary type of negative act immigrants were subjected to was social exclusion.

It would be advisable for future research investigating immigrants’ exposure to bullying to use quasi-objective measures along with a self-labelling measure, and to apply qualitative methods.

The heightened risk of culturally distant immigrants to being exposed to bullying might be reduced by improving employees’ cross-cultural communication skills and by promoting an atmosphere of acceptance of cultural diversity.

The study is an addition to the still scarce literature on immigrants’ exposure to workplace bullying, and takes into particular account immigrants’ cultural distance from their host culture.