21 Nov 2012 was the starting point for the number of foreign tourists in Korea to be more than 10 million. The purposes of their visit to Korea may be various like shopping, sightseeing of natural landscape or experience of Korean culture. Among those...
21 Nov 2012 was the starting point for the number of foreign tourists in Korea to be more than 10 million. The purposes of their visit to Korea may be various like shopping, sightseeing of natural landscape or experience of Korean culture. Among those, local festivals are the tour products which can offer a variety of contents such as shopping and culture experience directly and intensively. This dissertation applied the reputation which is currently considered to be critical from the viewpoint of marketing communication to local festivals for the research of the conditions for successful local festivals. It also researched the relationship between the local festivals and local loyalty from the viewpoint of internal and external interested parties so that it can offer a new concrete standard for the government or local governments holding them to appreciate and estimate their local festivals.
Three local festivals - Butterfly Festival in Hampyoung of Jeonnam, Namgang Lantern Festival in Jinju of Gyoungnam and Mud Festival in Boryoung of Chungnam - were selected for the subjects of this study with the consideration of venues, periods, times and budgets of those festivals. The samples of this study were locals of the region where festivals are held and outsiders who come to enjoy them, both of whom are in their 20s to 50s. The sampling method was on the basis of festival types and interested parties. As the method of collecting materials, the on-line survey utilizing structured questionnaire was applied and the research was carried out through professional Internet research institute for two weeks from 19 Oct 2012 to 02 Nov 2012. Each 100 people from internal and external respectively by festival type were collected and the total of 617 data was collected. The followings are the results of this study.
The first is the development of scale to estimate the reputation of local festivals. Research of the literature related to the reputation of local festivals and existing studies on local festivals was carried out to collect questions with which the reputation of local festivals can be estimated. And on the ground of that, pretest and main test were completed to get 37 questions with 6 scale factors for reputation of local festivals which have secured statistical reliability and validity. Those six factors are 'Factor of Festival Performance', 'Factor of Festival Immersion', 'Factor of Facility Satisfaction', 'Factor of Festival Material', 'Factor of Operating Organization', and 'Factor of Accessibility'.
The second is deducting the reputation index of local festivals. The reputation of the three festivals, the subjects for this study, were estimated by survey on the scale of 5 points so that the reputation index might be deducted with the relative importance by factor added. The results of deduction are the following: Mud Festival in Boryoung is Grade B+ and Butterfly Festival in Hampyoung and Namgang Lantern Festival in Jinju were Grade B-. The examination of indices by factor revealed that the factors of Festival Performance, Festival Materials and Festival Immersion took top ranks. That is, those festivals with higher performances, more intrinsic materials fit for regional features and higher immersion into festivals by participants were estimated to have outstanding reputation, and, therefore, festival performance and material and its immersion have been found to be the most critical standards for festival reputation.
The third is the analysis of the effect of local festival reputation on the local loyalty. The effect of the reputations of those three festivals by type and internal and external interested party on the emotional and behavioral loyalty was examined by structural equation analysis. On the whole, out of those 6 factors, the factor of Festival Immersion and the factor of Accessibility had the most effect on emotional loyalty and behavioral loyalty respectively. On the other hand, the factor of Operating Organization was found to have some negative effect in general, which is due to the features not of visitors but of locals. It can be thought to be a negative estimation of the agencies holding the festivals by internal interested parties, which makes it necessary for the local festivals to be newly studied from the viewpoint of their identities.
Keywords: Local Festival, Reputation, Loyalty, Structural Equation, Butterfly Festival in Hampyoung, Mud Festival in Boryoung, Namgang Lantern Festival in Jinju.