Why Standardization of Festival Marketing Might be a Cheesy Affair

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to segment visitors to a cheese festival to identify more appropriate marketing strategies. Segmentation can be based on various characteristics of consumers. One characteristic that has become popular over the last number of years is expenditure-based segmentation, which is an attempt to address issues of festival sustainability. Although this article falls in this cluster, we do not focus on the total spending of festival attendees like most research employing expenditure-based segmentation; we rather focus on the spending of attendees on the main theme of the festival, namely on cheese. Six hundred structured questionnaires were administered at the South African Cheese Festival that was held in the Western Cape during April 2015. Methods used in the analysis include factor analysis and cluster analysis. The main findings are that three clusters were identified with their own unique marketing mix and the clusters can be used as a taxonomy of visitors to this festival, namely mild cheese explorers, mature cheese families, and vintage cheese loyalists. This research has also revealed distinct motives for attending a cheese festival that were not found in previous research. Lastly, this approach is very useful in differentiating markets. This is the first time that cheese festival attendees' cheese expenditure and behavior have been used as segmentation basis and the research thus makes a contribution to literature and practice that strive to gain better insight into cheese tourism.