Emotion triggers relationship
Today, brands, institutions, and organizations no longer engage their audiences through messages, but through atmospheres that people can feel. Every event—whether it’s a trade show, symposium, or festival—is also a social experiment in which brands, people, and space come into resonance with one another.
It is about connections, about those moments in which the audience feels seen, understood and emotionally touched. Events thus function as resonance spaces in which architecture, light, sound, movement and digital interfaces interact, transforming emotion into tangible experiences and thus choreographing the collective event momentum.
Emotion technologies are creating a new cultural paradigm - one in which emotion is not only accompanied, but also built and shaped. However, the more emotion can be generated and evoked with technical stimuli, the greater the need for something that feels real, unmediated and not technologically controlled. Especially in the age of digitalization and AI, the value of human meaning and the longing for moments that feel real is growing. Live experiences are therefore becoming places of connection and cultural counter-spaces in which belonging and authentic resonance remain possible.
Authenticity of the emotion
The question of authenticity accompanies every form of social representation. Since Dean MacCannell formulated "staged authenticity", authenticity has changed from a moral to an aesthetic-social concept: What appears genuine is what appears coherent within its staging. Tourists are not looking for the real thing, but for a hint of it - the promise of a glimpse behind the scenes, knowing full well that staging also takes place there. Live marketing is also based on this tension between the so-called "front stage" and "back stage", between closeness and distance. The boundary between audience and actor, between authenticity and staging, is constantly being renegotiated. The audience experiences itself both as part of the production and as an observer - and it is precisely this multidimensional perspective that creates a new mode of authenticity.
How does the audience encounter the event? John Urry described the "tourist gaze" as a socio-cultural visual order that follows cultural patterns, expectations and desires. Where the tourist seeks the so-called "exotic other", the audience focuses with the so-called "event gaze" on the extraordinary event momentum that can be shared with others. It is this condensed, intense "now" that stands out from the everyday and the familiar. This gaze is also performative, because it produces the event that it observes - in the spirit of: Without a gaze there is no event, without an event there is no collective gaze. The "event gaze" is therefore not only visual, but also affective. When light, sound, silence, movement, rhythm and temperature affect the body, perception and emotion merge into a sensory dramaturgy. The audience not only sees, it also feels. And in the simultaneity of observation and resonance, a new form of reflexivity emerges as an experience that is reflected and aesthetically condensed in real time.
Authenticity appears here as a dynamic socio-cultural process with a constant balancing act between experience, representation and resonance. What appears emotionally coherent is credible and authentic. This is the logic of staged authenticity: authenticity is a mood that is created when the message, brand and its atmospheric perception resonate with people's senses.
Architecture of emotions
The space also becomes an actor and speaks in atmospheres that not only frame but also carry meaning. The fusion of architecture and mediality gives rise to a new spatial composition, the so-called "mediatecture". Stages, exhibition stands and immersive installations become places where brand and body resonate between narrative and sensation. Attitude can be experienced at the events through specifically composed atmospheres - whoever enters such spaces also enters an attitude.
Neon lights, raw surfaces, playful installations and industrial materials lend startup formats such as the St.Gallen START Summit an aura of energy, new beginnings and creative restlessness. The attitude conveyed is one of openness, courage and experimentation. The St.Gallen Symposium creates an atmosphere of trust, stability and cultivated exclusivity with its clear, internationally coded aesthetics, calm light axes, high-quality, solid materials and balanced proportions. It uses the formal language of large forums for global encounters and combines social relevance and international attention to create a concentrated moment of shared significance.
Authenticity can also unfold on a small scale and in intimate, interpersonal moments that may take place in front of a large audience, but which showcase the personal and interpersonal. For example, when professors take a seat on stage in an improvised shared kitchen at a kick-off day for new students - with a table lamp, teacup and casual closeness. In this setting, the stage becomes a place of personal moments. Such scenes are touching because they make the emotion of closeness tangible. Mediatecture thus becomes the emotional grammar of a brand: it translates attitude into experience and opens up a state that is experienced and reflected upon at the same time.
Technologies of emotion
Emotion is the central currency of attention. Where it is triggered, information is anchored more deeply - this applies to learning research as well as to experiential marketing. Events that touch us leave emotional traces in our memory and become points of reference for individual and collective recollection. The emotional architecture of an event can be described as a dramaturgically guided affect curve, the essential building blocks of which are excitement, relaxation, resonance and memory. When this curve is synchronized with the semantic identity of a brand, an affective coherence is created in which authenticity is not only claimed, but can actually be experienced.
Anticipation, wonder and belonging - a triad that supports meaningful experiences - can be used to compose emotions in a targeted manner. Anticipation opens up perception, amazement expands the moment, belonging strengthens the bond. Technologies such as sensory systems, immersive light and sound spaces or extended reality create an infrastructural level of feeling, and emotion becomes the central criterion of credibility. In addition to semantic coherence, the narrative dimension is also important. The use of metaphorical storytelling picks up on universal patterns that give us orientation. In this way, abstract brand values are transformed into emotionally tangible roles that resonate in the collective unconscious and with which we can intuitively identify.
Authenticity in live marketing is a social event, it happens in the social interaction of the participants. It arises when many people feel at the same time, when goosebumps, amazement, jubilation or silence are shared. The synchronization of affective experience creates community, and the narrative structures this experience as an emotional grid. This creates coherence on several levels: semantically, when disparate elements are connected narratively; affectively, when symbols activate emotions; and socially, when participants confirm authenticity through their collective participation.
Finally, technological systems not only open up new possibilities for design, but also for capturing and controlling emotional dynamics. Through sensor technology, data feedback and real-time control, affective states can be analyzed and specifically modulated. Emotion is thus transformed from an accompanying effect into a directing element - into a conscious component of an emotional dramaturgy that not only creates credibility but also continuously adjusts it.
Aura of momentum
How affective dynamics unfold in concrete terms can be observed particularly clearly in productions that make the uniqueness of a moment tangible to the senses. For example, when a painting is created on stage during a series of keynote speeches (seemingly detached from the action on stage), the situation is transformed into an aesthetic experiment. The artist becomes an actor who - like the audience - tries to distil an essence from the lectures. Thoughts and emotions become visible, materializing in color, form and movement. The resulting work, born in the moment and yet reaching beyond it, becomes a symbol of the shared experience - authentic because it is rooted in the here and now.
"The ability to categorize emotions culturally and place them in a context of meaning is reserved for humans."
Technological forms of emotional communication of the momentum do not have to be based on high-tech. Their effectiveness often unfolds through deliberate reduction or the use of unexpected forms of expression. The usual digital stopwatch of a start-up pitch could be replaced by a "timestop", which, for example, coupled to the rhythm of a historical embroidery machine, makes the progression of the pitch duration - in minutes - visible in real time. The steady embroidery process, projected onto walls, becomes both a timer and a symbol. Stitch by stitch, a textile is created that translates thoughts into threads, turning the act of embroidery into a metaphor for productive movement. At the START Summit in St.Gallen, Europe's largest student-organized conference for entrepreneurship and technology, this would still have a link back to the regional tradition of craftsmanship that meets the spirit of innovation. This connection creates emotional density - authentic because it surprises, touches and integrates the location itself into the narrative.
A digital representation or extension can frame the intensity, but cannot replace it - because it is precisely the fleeting nature of the moment that gives it its greatest value. It is the unrepeatability that gives the event its aura. The more consciously the audience experiences the unrepeatability of the momentum, the greater its affective intensity.
Paradox of staged emotion
This is precisely the challenge of live marketing. Credibility is created by embedding it in a narrative and social logic. If technology becomes the basis on which emotions are created, then the attitude of its use determines whether it generates resonance or alienation. The paradox of staged emotion is that authenticity manifests itself in the delicate balance between calculation and resonance and requires a human horizon of meaning that lends it weight.
Affective computing systems can recognize, reflect and amplify emotions. They modulate perception, create atmospheres and thus become a new affective dispositive - an invisible infrastructure of feeling. When these systems intervene in our emotional economies, it becomes clear that they can simulate closeness, but cannot create meaning. The ability to categorize emotion culturally and place it within a horizon of meaning remains reserved for humans.
This marks a fundamental change in event and communication practice. The event no longer functions as a singular experience, but as an integral part of an ongoing emotional process in which physical presence, digital expansion and algorithmic control intertwine. The market demands formats that combine emotionality, interaction and scalability in equal measure. Relevance is created where technology merges with cultural meaning - where strategic staging not only aims to attract attention, but also makes attitudes visible and develops a brand-creating effect.
"It is the unrepeatability that gives the event its aura.
About the author
Dr. Gulnaz Partschefeld completed her doctorate at the University of St.Gallen in the field of tourism and marketing research with a focus on authenticity and brand experience. As Head of Events Office, she has been shaping the strategic and creative development of the university's event management since 2019. In this role, she is responsible for the positioning of a consistent brand message, the external impact and the campus experience as a living resonance space for brand, architecture and community. With an interdisciplinary approach at the interface between marketing, cultural and communication sciences, she provides impetus for a forward-looking, authentic and sustainable design and presentation of educational and experiential spaces.
She also teaches courses on cultural aspects of tourism and Eastern European cultural history at the University of St.Gallen; her areas of specialization include brand authenticity, event management, media and disinformation. She appears in the media as an expert on Eastern Europe and Russia and comments on geopolitical developments.
