Giveaways: ett lyckosamt kommunikationsverktyg med etiska konsekvenser : en studie om Event Marketing och Giveaways

Sammanfattning: Consumers today seek added value to the ordinary products/services that companies are offering. Consumers must get their emotional need satisfied - a need for experiences worth remembering. At the same time, the consumers are engaged in ethics and morals. Companies use events frequently as a marketing approach to meet the customer’s demand of added value. At the events, giveaways are often handed out, which are gifts from the company consisting of own, sponsored or purchased products. Giveaways is an area which is relatively unexplored and considering today’s affluence of goods and the awareness of ethics it’s interesting to examine the companies’ motives for using giveaways and how they are received in the society by the consumers. The purpose of the thesis is therefore to examine giveaways as a phenomenon by following marketing theories; experience theory, event marketing theory, total communication theory and theory of word-of-mouth and also to put giveaways in a business ethics perspective. To answer this purpose four companies, which use giveaways, have been interviewed and thirty surveys were handed out to people who have participated in an event. These two perspectives of the phenomena, giveaways, the company perspective and the consumer perspective were compared and analysed. This resulted in the conclusions that companies use giveaways with varying motives and the gesture is received positively whatever the reasons for using them may be. On the other hand it’s only the specific products used as giveaways that inspire to further consumption of the company and not the gesture. Therefore the companies must really consider what products to use as giveaways, to inspire consumers and also to avoid damages on the company profile in the future. These reasons get even more important as several receivers of giveaways talk about their giveaway with other people outside the event. The company should also consider if they should use giveaways, as it is possible to criticize this marketing channel in many ways, with the argument of business ethics. In an ethical perspective, several aspects like pollution of the environment, human rights, and affluence of goods can question giveaways. Even though consumers at first react positively concerning giveaways, they are on further consideration more negative about it because of the possible ethic consequences. In addition to this the consumer prefers that resources during an event, which are used for giveaways, instead are concentrated to other things like food, entertainment and a raised quality.