The desires of leisure enjoying people for various leisure activities are on the rise, according to qualitative changes in their lives as leisure increases and economic level improves. Recent tourism industry, accordingly, attempts diverse methods to ...
The desires of leisure enjoying people for various leisure activities are on the rise, according to qualitative changes in their lives as leisure increases and economic level improves. Recent tourism industry, accordingly, attempts diverse methods to attract more tourists and meet their desires by developing new tourism products with active marketing strategies deviating from passive marketing strategies. Multiple festivals make an effort to differentiate them with innovative uniqueness in order to expand firm's market share in the limited markets. However, contemporary market economy is very fluctuating and uncertain, and constantly changes, and new market opportunities and threats are shaped and manifested. Each festival began to develop and promote their own peculiar images to cope with such difficulties. Especially, festival event characters are easy to be recognized, and remembered, in view of their visual feature. Those characters are also used to let people know about the festivals, or used as a stimulus for visualized differentiation from other festivals through strategic introduction of the characters, as an illustrating factor to explain the functions or efficacy of the concerned festivals, or sometimes as a brand. On the part of the firms, they can also enjoy positive effects, such as sales improvement, and image improvement through the introduction and utilization of the characters.
Despite such usefulness and introduction cases, there is a problem that in-depth studies about event characters have yet to be carried out. Of course, we can find some prior study cases about characters including animation, and fancy, but few studies have been conducted concerning characters to identify attitudes concerned with events and event participation intention. This study intended to find out correlations between event characters and event visitors, not identified in the existing studies of preferences and evaluation of characters.
This study has focused on the impacts of attitudes concerning the festival event character images upon the intention to participate in the events. This study analyzed event character images and their attributes, and explained structural relationship between the festival event participants' attitudes and their participation intentions.
This study also identified the festival characters selected by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism in 2005 among 743 Korean local festivals ,and categorized them by subject matter. Generally, often used characters include the characters of persons, animals, plants, minerals, and natural objects, and impersonation of goods, association character, and universe subject matter character. In this study, the association characters and persons characters, which were most used among local festival characters, along with formative attributes of those characters, have been analyzed.
The significance of this study lies in devising effective festival event characters in producing and using the festival event characters in the future events by examining such characters.
In this study, the concepts of festival events and characters have been inquired into through a literature research, and the theoretical backgrounds and situations of character images have been analyzed. A questionnaire survey was carried out to find out variables setting to measure festival event participants' attitudes and intentions to participate in the festival events, and analyze structural relationship between the attitude concerning the festival event character images and the status of participation in the festival events.
To summarize the findings in this study, as to the evaluation of each character according to the status of participation in events, the participants had higher evaluation than non-participants. The fondness and preference of characters had an impact on the intention to participate in the festival events. Such an intention to participate in festival events had an impact on the induction of interest in the participation in the festival events.
Also, it was found that when someone likes a character, he/she tends to recommend other consumers the participation in the concerned festival. When someone likes the concerned character, it influences his/her participation in festivals.