Abstract
Environmental issues (i.e., food safety and environmental pollution) have increased concerns about individuals’ health as well as global environment. These concerns drive awareness for the influences of healthy foods, and eventually lead them to visit healthy food exhibitions. This research aims to understand the attendees’ motives for participating in a healthy food exhibition. Specific objectives are to identify crucial visitors’ motives influencing satisfaction with the healthy food exhibition and to verify whether visitors’ satisfaction with the exhibition enhances their memory for the experience in the exhibition. The survey was conducted by targeting visitors who participated in the Busan International Food Expo, and the data collected from 363 attendees were analyzed using the SPSS and AMOS statistical programs. The analysis results revealed that three dimensions of healthy food exhibition motives, namely perceived healthiness, perceived hedonism and perceived food safety, increase visitors’ satisfaction with the healthy food exhibition, and that satisfaction with the healthy food exhibition further had a positive impact on the visitors’ memory for the exhibition experience.
Highlights
The recent global trends related to physical and mental wellness and an increasing personal health-related consciousness partly caused by personal stress and environmental pollution have raised awareness about the importance of healthy eating in daily life and changed consumers’ food purchase preferences [1,2,3]
Convergent validity for the sets of items was assessed by confirming the values of factor loadings for items and average variance extracted (AVE) for constructs based on the recommendation of Fornell and Larcker [82]
The results of this study suggest that exhibitors can enhance visitors’ positive memories with exhibition experiences by increasing the visitor perceptions of healthiness, hedonism, and food safety related to healthy foods products or services and heighten visitors’ satisfaction with the exhibition experiences
Summary
The recent global trends related to physical and mental wellness and an increasing personal health-related consciousness partly caused by personal stress and environmental pollution have raised awareness about the importance of healthy eating in daily life and changed consumers’ food purchase preferences [1,2,3]. Food selection criteria have shifted from taste and price to health-related food information such as nutrition and food materials and ingredients [4]. In line with this trend, consumers’ desires for more information about healthy food products, services, and/or manufactures drive them to attend food exhibitions [5]. Consumers are able to quickly learn and obtain information about and experience a variety of new products or services [8]. An exhibition is not just a pavilion, and an interactive place in which exhibitors communicate with attendees, and attendees experience connections with exhibitors and their tangible and intangible products and acquire solutions to their problems that help them with future purchasing decisions
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