Guidelines based on factors that encourage cultural festival tourism coordinators to accept and adopt marketing competencies

Abstract

The focus of this study is how to best support festival coordinators and festival tourism providers to adopt core competencies that will be most useful in creating a successful festival tourism marketing program. The objectives of this study were: 1. To investigate the current marketing competencies demonstrated by cultural festival coordinators. 2. To study cultural festival coordinators’ perceptions regarding the importance of marketing competencies. 3. To study the influence factors that cause cultural festival tourism coordinators to accept marketing competencies. 4. To study the influence factors that cause cultural festival tourism coordinators to adopt marketing competencies. 5. To provide guidelines that support cultural festival tourism coordinators to accept and adopt marketing competencies. This study was conducted by studying related internal factors and relationships of all 3 aspects affecting the adoption marketing competencies process based on the priority: 1) Perceived importance of marketing competencies idea 2) Acceptance of marketing competencies idea and 3) Adoption marketing competencies idea.

Structural equation model, as well as confirmatory factor analysis and path analysis, were used as the methodology. Data were collected from festival coordinators in Thailand. Primary data collected from the quantitative and qualitative method using nonprobability sampling and then use purposive sampling when collecting data. The sample size for quantitative according to Hatcher (1994) sample size should be the larger of 5 times the number of variables this research will collect more than150 samples to prevent error. As reported in this thesis, the modification model fit better, however, the analysis of the structural model revealed that all hypotheses are significant including three direct paths. The mediation role of acceptance in the model is also supported.

For qualitative data collection eleven interviews were conducted to add in-depth richer insight into the study for further verification of the perceived importance of marketing competencies idea, acceptance of marketing competencies idea and adoption marketing competencies idea. The findings support all of the hypothesis, however, discover some addition relationship among these model. These findings extend the application of the underpinned theories and their tenets in explaining the adoption behavior factors. The implication of findings are discussed and future research direction is recommended.