A cultural tourism research agenda

Abstract

The issues associated with accurately defining ‘art and cultural outputs’ as a ‘product’ is one that is familiar to both cultural tourism organisations and academics alike (Fillis, 2006). Those in cultural tourism organisations often reject the materialistic associations of ‘product’ when applied to their sector, as well as the notion of ‘consumer demand’, which does not accurately represent the primary driving force behind art/culture-based production nor does it the ‘relationship’ that exists between art/culture suppliers and art/culture consumers (Lehman & Wickham, 2014). Similarly, traditional marketing literature does not present a clear conceptualisation of how ‘art/cultural outputs’ comply with the traditional ‘product’ concept, and it rarely addresses the circumstances where product creation is not directly linked to customer needs/wants/demands (Kubacki & Croft, 2011). Despite this, effective art/cultural supply chain management (i.e. the production, marketing and consumption of art/cultural outputs) is increasingly recognised as an important driver of economic development, and essential to the development of sustainable art and cultural sectors (Evans, 2009 and Lehman and Wickham, 2014). Given these issues, this paper presents a research agenda for the reconceptualisation of the ‘product’ concept for the cultural tourism context. It will do so through the lens of Levitt’s (1980) Customer Value Hierarchy (see Fig. 1) - a framework that identifies a range of ‘product levels’ that serve to deliver ‘core benefits’ sought by different consumer segments across the art/cultural supply chain.