Linking engagement at cultural festivals to legacy impacts

Abstract

Cultural festivals typically celebrate and reinforce a cultural identity, while becoming embedded in tourism experiences. They have sought to establish their sustainability through legacies of enduring involvement with the cultures and communities they serve. Although studies have examined the effects of attendance on festival impacts and legacy, we contribute further understanding by investigating the effects of visitors’ level of behavioural engagement during a festival on subsequent cultural and social post-festival legacies. Basing our conceptual development on van Doorn et al.’s Customer Engagement Behaviour framework and Service-Dominant-Logic, we incorporate behavioural engagement, emotions, festival loyalty, and post-festival cultural and social involvement intentions. Hypotheses are tested in two studies with data from 1335 visitors covering consecutive years of a national cultural festival, using cluster and mediation analyses. Findings highlight the importance of engagement and joyful emotions on festival legacy benefits. We validate an “engagement ladder” comprising four distinct clusters – “Disengaged”, “Observers”, “Learners”, and “Doers”. The most engaged clusters – “Learners” and “Doers” – have significantly higher association with legacy impacts, manifested through post-festival cultural and community involvement intentions. Our results have implications for sponsors and organisers of cultural festivals whose sustainability may be justified by encouraging visitor engagement rather than merely promoting attendance.

Keywords:

• Festivals
• visitors
• engagement clusters
• festival legacies
• cultural impacts
• Wales (UK)

Acknowledgements

We would like to express our gratitude to the festival organisers for their support in assisting the data collection. We would also like to thank Dr Andrea Collins, Dr Eleri Rosier and our two placement students, Sioned Murphy and Math Emyr (funded by the CUROP programme at the lead author's institution) for their guidance, help with translation and support in the data collection for the project. In addition, we would like to thank the reviewers for their constructive feedback and guidance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nicole Koenig-Lewis

Dr Nicole Koenig-Lewis is Associate Professor in Marketing in Cardiff University’s Business School, UK. Her research interests include customer/visitor experiences, festivals, the sharing economy, and sustainable consumer behaviour with a special focus on engagement, the role of emotions and consumer attitudes. Her work has been published in journals such as Annals of Tourism Research, Tourism Management, Journal of Services Marketing, and Journal of Business Research. She is the Co-Editor of Public Value: Deepening, Enriching, and Broadening the Theory and Practice (Routledge, 2019).

Adrian Palmer

Prof Adrian Palmer is Professor of Marketing at Henley Business School, University of Reading, UK. His previous management career in the travel and tourism sector has informed his academic research in the field of services buyer behaviour and customer relationship development, previously published in, among other places, Annals of Tourism Research and Tourism Management.

Yousra Asaad

Dr Yousra Asaad is Senior Lecturer in Marketing at Brunel University’s Business School, UK. Her research interests include tourist experiences, the sharing economy, and sustainable consumer behaviour with a special focus on social interaction and consumer wellbeing. Her work has been published in journals such as Journal of Tourism Research and Journal of Business Research.