Festivals offer experiences and are provided with an aim to help visitors to have valuable experiences. Local governments and festival planners strive to develop a festival brand to ensure continued participation of visitors in each of their festivals...
Festivals offer experiences and are provided with an aim to help visitors to have valuable experiences. Local governments and festival planners strive to develop a festival brand to ensure continued participation of visitors in each of their festivals that will abound more in number in the future. However, there are very few studies covering the relations between factors of festival experience of domestic and foreign visitors and festival brand equitys that can be applied as a practical data by relevant officials at local governments or festival planners. Therefore, this study conducted a survey to explore how experiential factors represented in this paper as Sense, Feel, Think, Act and Relate affected brand equity such as festival brand awareness, brand image, perceived quality and brand loyalty based on the concept of holistic experience developed by Schmitt (1999). The samples included Koreans and foreigners visiting a festival in the Republic of Korea. The survey aimed to verify how festival experiential factors by domestic and foreign visitors related to festival brand equity and identify how domestic visitors differed from foreign visitors in this regard.
300 samples including 150 Koreans and 150 foreigners who visited the Itaewon Global Village Festival, Seoul over a two-day period, October 11 and 12, 2014 were asked to take part in a questionnaire-based face-to-face interview and 225 valid samples were statistically analyzed. The data were subject to frequency analysis, factor analysis, correlation analysis, and multiple regression analysis with the application of SPSS 18.0.
The results are as follows.
First, based on the analysis of the relations between experiential factors by domestic and foreign visitors, the factors such as Sense, Feel, Think and Relate affected festival brand equity consisting of brand awareness, brand image, perceived quality and brand loyalty, supporting the previous survey results.
Second, the relations between experiential factors by domestic visitors and brand assets were analyzed, revealing that experiential factors such as Feel and Relate influenced brand awareness while experiential factors of Think and Relate had significant effects on brand image. Also, experiential factors of Feel affected perceived quality while factors like Sense and Feel had significant effects on brand loyalty.
Third, regression analysis of the relations between experiential factors by foreign visitors and brand equity proved that experiential factors of Sense and Relate had significant effects on brand awareness, brand image and perceived quality. On the other hand, as for brand loyalty, only Sense was significantly influential.
Fourth, there was a significant difference in the relations between brand assets and experiential factors by domestic and foreign visitors. Specifically, Feel had the greatest effect on overall brand equity of domestic visitors while Sense played the most critical role for foreign visitors, reflecting a wide gap between the two different sample groups. Especially, in the foreign visitors group, factors of Feel and Think had no significant effect on brand equity.
This study supports the hypothesis that the festival experiential factors by domestic and foreign visitors have significant effects on festival brand equity such as brand awareness, brand image, perceived quality, and brand loyalty. Hence, it will be necessary to arrange various experience-based programs that can leave good impressions and lead visitors to have more valuable experiences. For example, the factor, Feel was critical for domestic visitors while Sense played an important role in the case of foreign visitors. If this result is applied in the arrangement of an experience-based program aimed at each different target, a more substantial and successful festival will be developed. Also, the survey result showed that there were more temporary visitors, meaning that more diverse strategies shall be arranged to reinforce brand loyalty. An alternative to this phenomenon can be multiple festivals available over a certain period in a certain area so that visitors can benefit more from multiple events within a given budget. This study covered only the English-speaking foreign visitors using English questionnaire and did not include other language users such as Chinese and Japanese visitors taking up most of the inbound visitors. Hence, it will be more meaningful to survey with a questionnaire prepared in Chinese and Japanese in the future. Also, this study did not explore the relations between the experiential factor, Act and brand equity, requiring a comparative study covering domestic and foreign visitors with a supplemented questionnaire. It will be desirable to design and conduct a further study covering multiple festivals as the results of a questionnaire survey covering visitors taking part in only one festival will have their own limits, compromising generalization of the relevant findings.