To Rome with love: A moderated mediation model in Roman heritage consumption

Abstract

This paper tests a moderated mediation model based on hypothesized relationships in heritage marketing between event involvement, place attachment, experience authenticity, and revisit intention, and finds that place attachment mediates the event involvement–revisit intention relationship and that experience authenticity moderates the mediation. The relationships are explored with a sample of people attending a Roman heritage festival in Italy (n = 350). Based on suggestions from environmental psychology, the model is then split to compare neighborhood and non-neighborhood tourists, and younger and older tourists. Results show that revisit intention for closer and older tourists relies more on place attachment than on event involvement; the reverse is true for distal and younger tourists. Finally, tourists’ freely elicited motivations are analyzed by computing an original place-or-event-relatedness score, continuous and centered on zero, which corroborates the findings from the moderated mediation models. Theoretical and managerial implications are addressed.