Alessandro Sorbello from Brisbane and Dr Eliane Karsaklian take out Best Research Award at the prestigious International Academy of Business and Economics Conference held on June 16-18 2016, at the University of Florence and Pisa.

Alessandro Sorbello www.alessandrosorbello.com from Brisbane and Dr Eliane Karsaklian
http://ubi-orbi.com/our-founder  takes out Best Research Award at the prestigious International Academy of Business and Economics Conference held on June 16-18 2016, at the University of Florence and Pisa.

Sorbello has been working on his doctoral research with Dr Eliane Karsaklian who is Paris based director of a trilingual Professional Master Program in International Negotiation at Université Sorbonne, one of the most reputed universities in the world. Sorbello flew to the University of Florence to receive the award and present the keynote address together with Dr Karsaklian.
Sorbello and Karsaklian presented ‘From Lasagna to Lamborghini, Leveraging the power of an Italian Festival as a comprehensive marketing tool: The Case of Italian Week in Australia’ to scholars from more than 70 universities from around the world.

The research is a case study of the Queensland based Italian Week Festival and explores the marketing potential revealed by the festivals intentional creation of ‘emotional engagement’ with its participants and its subsequent residual effects on consumer behaviour.

Alessandro Sorbello is the passionate producer and creative catalyst behind Italian Week and has been since its inception.  Over the past 10 years, the festival has increased from 2000 people in 2007 to over 1 million people in 2016. These are people that saw Australia’s largest tribute to Italy with “the Illumination” in the heart of Brisbane as 6 major structures including the iconic Story Bridge and QPAC and Brisbane’s City Hall were illuminated in Green white and red to celebrate the Italian national day.

In 2010 Alessandro was awarded the title of ‘Cavaliere’ (Knight) from the President of the Republic of Italy for the development of the Italian Week festival for the promotion of Italian culture in the modern context in Australia.

Sorbello explained “The theories we have been applying to the production of the event have been validated and celebrated in Italy and it’s very exciting so looking forward to where we can go from here, well I am especially excited to be further developing the concepts of emotional engagement and presenting our findings to the marketing and event community”