Examining food festival attendees’ existential authenticity and experiential value on affective factors and loyalty: An application of stimulus-organism-response paradigm

Abstract

Food festivals appeal to a broad range of potential attendees. However, for food festival attendees to engage in such a food adventure to arouse high levels of satisfaction in an environment different from their home, their true authentic self may need to be restrained. The present, study, thus uses Stimulus-Organism-Response (SOR) paradigm to examine the relationship among existential authenticity, experiential value, satisfaction, customer delight, and loyalty within the food festival context. Using a questionnaire survey, 598 festival attendees of a food event were sampled conveniently. The results show that while experiential value and existential authenticity are important environmental stimuli within the food festival setting, not all emotional states are influenced by existential authenticity. Existential authenticity is negatively related to satisfaction suggesting that the more attendees are true to themselves regarding different food cultures, the lesser they are to be satisfied. Moreover, festival attendees’ loyalty is affected by both satisfaction and customer delight. Implications for marketing food festivals to meet the preferences of prospective attendees are discussed.