The Importance of Recycling to U.S. Festival Visitors: A Preliminary Study

Abstract

Understanding visitors’ perceptions, motivations, and values in attending festivals is vital to creating an effective marketing strategy. Visitors often take part in festivals with special motivations and interests in the festivals’ purpose. Despite a level of disparity in their motivations, visitors’ involvement may be strongly linked to common values and events of the festival with the other visitors. Because of festivals’ unique and effective settings (e.g., education, experience, and participation, etc.), they represent distinctive opportunities to understand visitors’ pro-environmental behavior and attitudes. The objective of this study was to measure visitor recycling behavior, attitude and intentions as the basis for selective marketing classification and festival management. The results suggest that those with high recycling intention have strong attitudes toward festivals providing recycling stations and the use of renewable energy. These results would assist in improving festival attendance and possibly increasing revenue and could also lead to building better connections to the local community.

KEYWORDS:

• recycling
• festival tourism
• psychographics