Visitors’ Research On The Three Cultural Festivals In Indiana, U.S.

In the rapid development of the global cultural industry and leisure experience economy, as a mean of destination marketing for towns which are far from big cities or urban areas, community festivals and events become more and more popular to communicate the local culture with festival visitors. A local cultural festival, as a common type of cultural tourism, creates a kind of culture-themed festival atmospherics for tourists’leisure experience, with some core cultural elements and entertainment activities, nice environmental layout and design as well as festival service and social interaction. To some extent, for small communities, local cultural festivals play a role of stimulating economy recovery, continuing local culture and stabilizing society, by a form of cultural tourism to attract lots of local and non-local visitors. For festival organizers and destination marketing organizations, identification with and retention of loyal visitors who are psychologically committed to the festival are a practical means for ensuring a consistent number of visitors to that festival and its hosting community.Therefore, based on a principle that a local destination can communicate its culture with visitors through the leisure experience during a cultural festival, this present study examined how festival visitors’ develop loyalty to festivals and hosting communities through the affective and psychological processes within the Mehrabian-Russell (M-R) model. Through an onsite and follow-up mixed-mode survey, data were collected during2011-2012from totally755visitors to three cultural festivals in Indiana, U.S. Data analysis was performed using structural question modeling (SEM) for233visitors who are available in the follow-up survey. The study findings provided empirical evidence in support of the M-R model within cultural festival contexts, and revealed that festival atmospherics had a positive indirect effect on festival loyalty via positive emotions, festival commitment, and festival satisfaction, which in turn positively influenced place loyalty. The framework and process for this study is as follows:Chapter I (Introduction) explained the background, key issues, importance and purpose of the research. The innovation points are also put forward:a. the paper innovatively defined the environment stimulus as festival atmospherics which can lead to positive emotions; b. the paper considered the total festival atmospherics as a cultural experience product for destination branding. The supply-demand relationship is carried out by "space leasing" to experience the local culture through festival atomosphics; c. the paper fully demonstrated the cross-discipline perspective for the rising cultural festival industry, creatively combining psychological theories including the traditional behavior psychology, environmental psychology and space aesthetics with marketing theories including satisfaction and loyalty; d. the paper aimed to deal with the relationship between festival experience and destination branding through a quantitative analysis which is varely used in the domestic destination branding research, trying to provide some theoretical and practical implications for the demoestic cultural festival industry.Chapter II (Theoretical Framework and Hypothesized Model) presented the theoretical literature related to the Mehrabian-Russell Model and recent studies about cultural tourism, festival/tourist experience in the background of global cultural industry, with a series of academic database such as ProQuest, EBSCO as well as CNKI and Wanfang Data. Then we adaped Mehrabian-Russell (M-R) model within the context of local cultural festivals, to construct the emotional experience model, trying to figure out the effect factors of loyalty towards the festival and the hosting community.Chapter III (Research Design and Methods) elaborated the research design with on-site survey and follow-up survey to collect visitors’questionnaire data.Chapter IV (Validation of the Cultural Festival Experience Model) quantitatively showed the specific data results about visitors’ characteristics, confirmatory analysis and tested the construct validity and structural model to figure out the direct and indirect effects between factors.Chapter V (Analysis of Visitors’Experience and Suggestions) analyzed the visitors’ characteristics, emotional effects, and motivational factors to put forward some experience-creating suggestions for domestic festival organizers and destination branding organizations. Chapter VI (Conclusion and discussion) concluded a series of theoretical and practical implications of destination branding through creating festival experience. At the same time, some implications for cultural festivals at home, research limitations and future suggestions are given correspontively.