Attendees' experiences of anime conventions in the United States: a netnography study

Abstract

PurposeGuided by stimulus-organism-response (SOR) theory, this study analyzed the user-generated content (UGC) produced by attendees from six anime conventions in the USA.Design/methodology/approachA total of 739 online reviews and 1,932 photos were collected from the social platforms of six large anime conventions in the USA (Yelp and Facebook), and the study employed thematic analysis and image analysis to analyze the collected UGCs.FindingsThe findings revealed eight main themes (i.e. ambient and space, customers, service and products, sign and symbol, social density, emotional status, motivation, and behavior intention) and 32 subthemes across the three dimensions of SOR theory. Leveraging the power of cutting-edge image analysis, the image labels obtained from the analysis contributed to the creation of network clusters. The result of the image analysis also continued consistently with the thematic analysis result, which reflected SOR theory.Research limitations/implicationsTheoretically, the study applied SOR theory and blended thematic and image analyses to gain a comprehensive understanding of anime convention attendees’ experience and categorized the attendees’ emotional status as positive or negative to reflect their overall evaluation. Practically, this study highlighted some complaints from attendees and provided suggestions for operators. However, the study focused only on large anime conventions in the USA; future studies should compare attendees’ experiences with small and large conventions or anime conventions worldwide.Originality/valueThe study utilized UGCs to understand the key patterns essential to attendees during anime conventions in the USA and applied SOR theory to its investigation.