The relationship between food neophobia, domain-specific innovativeness, and food festival revisit intentions

Abstract

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to investigate the influence of two personality traits (i.e. food neophobia (FN) and domain-specific innovativeness (DSI)) on revisit intentions of consumers in the food festival context.Design/methodology/approachThe study adopted a FN scale, DSI scale and food festival revisit intention scale to capture the study constructs. Furthermore, data were collected from 265 food festival attendees in the town of Udupi (State of Karnataka, India). Furthermore, the study adopted structural equating modeling to investigate the relationship between the three study constructs.FindingsThe findings of this study reveals that DSI seems to exercise significant positive influence on consumers revisit intentions for the food festival. On the contrary, FN seems to exercise a negative influence on consumers revisit intentions. This relation, however, is found to be non-significant.Practical implicationsThe findings of this study are expected to help food festival event managers, organizers and practitioners outline and delineate marketing strategies so as to increase the revisit intentions of consumers for the food festivals.Originality/valueFN and DSI have been extensively studied in the context of consumers’ food consumption and related behaviors. On the contrary, majority of the studies that relate to festival revisit intentions situate consumers’ experiential values and satisfaction with attributes of the festival itself (e.g. location, affordability, quality of food, infrastructure, venue ambiance, service quality, entertainment avenues, timing and duration and size of the festival) as key precursors to their revisit propensity. This research endeavor, however, attempts to investigate whether, notwithstanding other food festival attributes, personality traits of individuals (i.e. FN and DSI) exercise any influence on food festival revisit intentions.