Enhancing recommendations and revisit intentions to museums through experiences: the mediated role of visitors’ perception of coolness and feeling of authentic pride

• Autor(a) principal: Blanco, Teresa Maria Rebelo de Andrade Castro
• Data de Publicação: 2020
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10071/20559
• topic: Museum experiences; Atmospheric cues; Museum brand coolness; Authentic pride; Revisit; Recommend; Experiência no museu; Pistas atmosféricas; Coolness do museu (Marca); Orgulho autêntico; Revisitar; Recomendar

Museums are an ancient form of recreation, but nowadays it is imperative to design experiences that will make visitors want to talk about. Today, visitors can demonstrate gratification towards a museum through social media platforms and the importance of posts and comments in the tourism sector has grown in the past years. The aim of this study is to investigate the effect of museum experiences on visitors’ willingness to recommend a museum and desire to return. The conceptual model is based on the S-O-R framework (Mehrabian and Russell, 1974) and includes: Museum Atmospheric Cues as the stimulus component; Museum Coolness and Authentic Pride as the organism element, and the Intention to Recommend and Revisit Intention as behaviour responses. This model was tested with a sample of 308 museum visitors, collected in the National Coach Museum; the Museum of Art, Architecture, and Technology (MAAT); the National Tile Museum, and the Orient Museum. Data was collected by quantitative analysis, and its investigation allowed to conclude that there are positive relationships between the five constructs of the conceptual model. Museum Atmospheric Cues contribute to the perception of Museum Coolness and the feeling of Authentic Pride, which have an effect on the intentions to Recommend and Revisit a museum. The perception of Museum Coolness has a stronger influence on both intentions to Revisit and Recommend. The findings provide a good understanding of the drivers of revisit and recommend intentions, and several managerial implications and further research suggestions can be pointed out from this study.