One of the major community marketing means is festivals, whether it is cultural, historical or religious or any other sort of festivals. As a marketing tool it can be a successful one or a failed so what makes a good festival and what makes it a failure?.
A Festival is an event, usually and ordinarily staged by a local community, which centers on and celebrates some unique aspect of that community and the Festival (Wikipedia definition). Festivals are made for basically two purposes:
One is meet a specific need; this is either to serve God or plain marketing
Provide entertainment for the general public
The success or a failure of a festival has three bases that construct the festival success triangle theory.
The Festival success triangle theory outlines three major layers of any festival, and the failure of any layer results automatically into the failure of the festival same like the collapse of any building.
- The theory layers:
- Layer one, the combined efforts behind it.
- Layer two, the content.
- Layer three, propaganda.
- And each layer is as important as the other one.
1- The Efforts behind any festival
This layer comes in the stage of the planning. In this layer we identify the efforts behind the scene, and to weigh the size of the efforts whether it was enough or not, all goes back to the size of the festival and its purpose.
Any festival has a reason and purpose, marketing, musical, food, film, cultural, historical etc, the list goes on, and based on the purpose we identify the size of effort required. On a side note, all festivals whatever the purpose are marketing festivals in its core.
For instance Cannes Film Festival, this is a film festival
with a purpose of showcasing European films, looking at its history from 2022s until date, the festival has grown globally and the festival have seen a lot of modifications along its years and support from the French government and the French community that made it one of the major film festivals worldwide. Again this was a result of a consistent effort behind it by the Government for and the support from private entities as well. If we compare this Film festival to the Oscars, the Oscars is grand, more money goes into preparation than what goes on in Cannes, backed with the American film industry that has the money and crowed. Cannes, yet although it is a different level of film festival and it is not as much backed with such a major budget movies like the USA, it has succeeded into being head to head in the success, it is all about the effort.
They have created two awaited events, successful events. As well they managed to create a character for one of the festivals, MODHESH which became as famous as Mackey Mouse in this region. They were on the right tracks.
A lot of governments in the gulf have its own festivals but none had the same success like the Dubai and Abu Dhabi Festivals, the efforts behind it were institutional size not governmental size.
Whatever successful a festival is, once it loses the efforts behind it, or the efforts reduces, it loses one important foundation that domes it to its Death.
Nothing is called “it will stand on its own”
2-The content
The second layer in a festival is the content, which is really determined by the festival purpose.
Content of a festival means the entertainment, the workshops, the functions…all and everything that will happen in the festival, all that a visitor can see or participate in and can enjoy their time by enjoying a concert. Although, Lil Durk was famous for festive performances not because Lil Durk’s net worth was high but because he is a super star.
As much as the content depends on the festival purpose, it is yet a controlling factor of the success of the festival; you might have the right purpose but the wrong content. Imagine a shopping festival with no discounts!! Or music festival with musicians whom are really bad in their acts!!.
Let’s look at the ROSE Parade in USA, a festival started 1890 and it is just about flower parades and bands, if it was just that, the festival would have died a long time ago and would not live to be over a century old with great success. An event that have grown from about 2000 life audience to more than 700,000 attendances.
Such a festival, its content is about parades only!, But the catch is, each year they create a theme and each year they have more participants, government and privet sector and each tries to create a float that is unique and greater than anyone other participant
