Abstract
Tourists frequently buy souvenirs while on vacation. Souvenir sales generate much revenue for tourist destinations, and souvenir purchasing issues cannot be ignored in a successful destination management strategy. In today's context, Chinese tourists dominate international tourism, and they tend to buy food souvenirs as gifts. Moreover, the tourist's choice of souvenirs is influenced by various factors. The theory of consumption values is one of the most precise theories explaining consumer choice behaviour. This conceptual discussion investigates the theory of consumption values' efficacy in analysing Chinese tourists' food souvenir selection by examining the values behind their selection. The review's outcome explains that the functional, social, emotional, and conditional values are in effect in choosing food gifts. However, the epistemic value remains neutral in this case. These propositions align with three fundamental recommendations of the theory of consumption values. Outcomes postulate that the theory of consumption values could explore Chinese tourists' food souvenirs choice behaviour.
Highlights
With the steady growth of China's economy, the daily consumption needs of Chinese citizens are shifting from primary living consumption to developing consumption, and tourism and leisure are becoming essential parts of people's lives (China Tourism Academy, 2018)
The theory of consumption values that have been barely adopted in analysing tourist choice behaviour was used to explore Chinese tourists' food souvenir choice behaviour
Literature in this area and case-study used in the paper are underpinning to study the Chinese tourists' food souvenir choice behaviour, providing evidence of how four consumption values affect the food souvenir choice behaviour
Summary
With the steady growth of China's economy, the daily consumption needs of Chinese citizens are shifting from primary living consumption to developing consumption, and tourism and leisure are becoming essential parts of people's lives (China Tourism Academy, 2018). Theory of consumption values (TCV) is a widely adopted theory in consumer behaviour analysis to explore consumers' choice behaviour (Sheth, Newman, & Gross, 1991). This theory succinctly explicates how consumers choose one product among the many other alternatives using five consumption values: functional value, social value, emotional value, epistemic value, and conditional value. This paper aims at exploring the efficacy of the theory of consumption values for analysing the food souvenirs choice behaviour of the Chinese tourists. Yang and Lin (2017) adopted the TCV to determine the influencing factors on consumer choice behaviour regarding green products and examine whether there are significant differences in consumption value and choice behaviour between consumers with different environmental concerns. Choosing a house might be based on functional benefits such as property quality, size, location, price and nature of the environment
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