Contemporary consumers who have achieved material satisfaction pursue emotional, sensuous, and intelligent contents and benefits such as fun, pleasure, and fancy from consumption activities, and develop interest in the consumption of culture-art produ...
Contemporary consumers who have achieved material satisfaction pursue emotional, sensuous, and intelligent contents and benefits such as fun, pleasure, and fancy from consumption activities, and develop interest in the consumption of culture-art products to express their own internal and external characteristics. Culture-art products are creations that express an artist’s spirit and ideas, and are consumed by consumers through their emotional, aesthetic, and social faculties. A culture-art product that has been the object of the public’s consumption satisfies consumers’ emotional and sensuous desires and is consumed as an education effect for intellectual improvement.
As people become increasingly interested in the application value of culture-art aimed at stepping up creative competitiveness in today’s knowledge-based society, individuals, companies, and nations are implementing various assistance policies for revitalizing culture-art, and a great number of researches are being conducted to expand the supply of and demand for culture and art. Culture-art products need special conditions for their consumption, however, unlike general leisure or entertainment products. These conditions include not only economic affluence, free time, and personal taste, but also an adequate intellectual level and the experience to appreciate culture-art. The demand for culture-art products can hardly be created by marketing stimuli, unlike commodities and service products .
This research, which paid attention to these problems, was conducted to develop a research model aimed at comprehensively understanding the consumers of culture-art products who consume a distinctive product of culture-art based on the diversity of the contemporary consumption culture, and to present practical implications aimed at enhancing the effectiveness of culture-art marketing conducted by culture and art product manufacturing and policy agencies and companies that use culture-art. Therefore, this research sought to examine culture-art product consumers’ conception structure and sub-dimensions of value cognition and benefits in the aesthetic and social contexts to comprehensively understand them from the marketing viewpoint, and to determine the effects of their value-cognition and benefits on attributes.
To achieve these goals, a focus group interview(FGI) was conducted as a qualitative research method of examining the conception structure and relationship of the value cognition and benefits of consumers on culture-art products, and as a quantitative research method of determining the sub-dimensions of value cognition, benefits, and attributes of culture-art products and of empirically identifying their relationships.
In the qualitative research, a total of 58 males and females in their 10s to 50s who were living in capital areas, metropolitan cities, and small and medium-sized cities were divided into 12 groups, and an FGI was conducted with each group for a total of 12 FGIs. This research studied the conception structure and relationship of the value cognition and benefits of the consumers of culture and art products by extracting key words from them via the questionnaires, by requesting 4 related-experts to do so, and classifying and categorizing those words according to the similarities of and differences in their meanings.
In the quantitative research, the main survey was conducted after questions were drawn up about the consumers’ preferred product attributes based on a preliminary survey, and then verifying the feasibility of each question based on the conception structure of the value cognition and benefits derived from the qualitative research and previous researches. This survey was conducted online and offline among a total of 662 persons in their 10s to 50s who were living in Seoul, Gyeonggi-do, metropolitan cities, and small and medium-sized cities. The collected data were analyzed via factor analysis, regression analysis, canonical correlation analysis, and path analysis using SPSS WIN 18.0 and AMOS 16.0.
The results of the qualitative and quantitative researches are as follows.
First, it was found that the consumers of culture-art products had the following 3 conception structures of value cognitions: actual and individual merit goods, aesthetic and sensuous merit goods, and social public property and that their benefits had the following 3 conception structures: aesthetic character-oriented, social relationships-oriented, and individual benefits-oriented. The examination of the relationship between the consumers’ value cognitions and benefits showed that their value cognitions had a conceptual influence on their benefits. Such conception structures and the relationship explain the characteristics of the value judgment of the consumers and the benefits that ensue.
Second, the sub-dimensions of value cognitions and benefits of the consumers of culture-art products and attributes were empirically found to be as follows: their value cognitions turned out to be 3 factors - individual merit goods, aesthetic merit goods, and social public property. The sub-dimensions of benefits turned out to be 4 factors - pursuit of aesthetic character, pursuit of actual benefits, pursuit of emotional benefits and pursuit of conspicuous character, and The sub-dimensions of attributes to be 4 factors - environmental impact, price, communication, people, artwork, composition, and personal relations.
Third, the regression analysis, canonical correlation analysis, and path analysis that were conducted to understand the relationship of the value cognitions, benefits, and attributes of the consumers showed that the value cognitions factors of the consumers toward culture-art products had an influence on the benefit factors, and that the benefit factors had an influence on the attribute factors and it was confirmed that the value cognitions of the consumers had an influence on their preferred product attributes by way of their benefits.
These results confirm that while culture-art products have ideal and abstract characteristics, they are goods that yield actual benefits for individual consumers and society and that the benefits are attained according to the consumer’s value cognition, through which he or she chooses product attributes.
Based on the conception structures and the sub-dimensions of value cognitions of the consumers on culture-art products that were shown in this research, a concrete methodology can be devised to provide education and experience opportunities aimed at positively forming and strengthening consumers’ value cognitions of culture and-products and the attribute development of culture-art products according to consumers’ sub-dimension of benefits can be benefit to consumer practically as an ideal culture-art product.
The sub-dimensions of value cognitions and benefits of the consumers on culture-art products and attributes of culture-art products and their relationships that were shown in this research can be used to study and understand consumers of culture-art products who pursue various consumption values academically, and can be provided as consumer information for use by culture-art product producers, companies that use culture and art, and government agencies that are trying to improve the quality of life of the public practically.