Janine Hofmann

Janine Hofmann is a bachelor student in media and communication science at the Technical University of Ilmenau. She is currently writing her bachelor thesis in the field of media and communication management. The topic of her work is "The Influence of Corporate Social Responsibility on Consumers' Purchasing Decisions Using the Example of Festival Tickets."

Through an internship at the company Höme für Festivals GmbH, which brings a new ticketing on the market, she became aware of the current festival ticketing situation. She is a festival organizer herself and has been able to observe the change in the industry towards more awareness. The question to what extent the consumers support this progress by a different purchase decision motivated her to write this paper. For this purpose, she uses the Choice-Based Conjoint Analysis (CBC), comparing the attributes, brand awareness, CSR activities, ease of purchase, and price.
Together with the company Höme and the Department of Media and Communication Management at the Technical University of Ilmenau, which offers an accompanying seminar, she would like to find out whether corporate social responsibility also appeals to the festival industry.

The present study addresses the influence of CSR activities on the purchase decision of festival tickets. As an example, the company Höme - Für Festivals GmbH with a newly launched solidarity ticketing system is analyzed here.

The decisive factor for a decision is the weighing of a cost-benefit consideration including normative-affective factors. Explanatory attempts from socioeconomics and boycott research are used as theoretical background. Instrumental motivations, the preservation of self-image, the "I-We" paradigm, and the influence of emotions can drive CSR-oriented purchasing. A choice-based conjoint analysis was used to determine both the importance of the attributes, price, payment options, customer ratings and CSR activities, and the benefit contributions of the individual attributes. From this, a product preference could be derived and market shares were predicted by means of a simulation. N=183 festival attendees participated in the conjoint analysis, which was collected through social media of various festivals and Höme.

The study showed that CSR activities have a higher importance in decision making than price. Furthermore, it was found that female visitors consider CSR activities more important than male visitors. In the area of music genres, it was found that visitors of metal and indie festivals see an above-average importance in CSR activities, whereas pop festivals are below average. 
Since this work refers to specific music genres and cannot be generalized in comparison to the number of overall festival visitors, further studies in this area are extremely interesting.