The Role of Shared Values in Understanding Loyalty over Time: A Longitudinal Study on Music Festivals

摘要

Tourism's unique features limit the consumer behavior literature's ability to explain consumer loyalty. More precisely, existing consumer loyalty models do not consider social and cultural dimensions highlighted by tourism literature. Using new institutional theory, this article proposes a new perspective to explain loyalty. This study of musical festival patrons and managers combines cognitive mapping and questionnaires. Findings demonstrate that shared values between managers and festival-goers influence the latter's loyalty. More precisely, shared values impact attitudinal loyalty and word-of-mouth, but they do not affect behavioral loyalty. Results also show that festival-goer loyalty decreases more slowly over time when a high level of shared values exist. Beyond music festivals, this study highlights a more sociological approach to explain loyalty over time in tourism.