An Exploratory Study of Segmenting Visitors to a Community Festival

Abstract Understanding motivations of festival visitors is one of critical issues for learning about the visitors’ behaviors and intentions for some specific festivals and such knowledge will help festival sponsors customize and market their event products to customer. The purpose of this study is twofold. First, an attempt is made to identify visitors’ motivations for an art festival. Second, the designated motivations serve as a foundation to segment visitors into various groups. For that, a survey based on previous studies was administrated in Central Minnesota, USA and a total of 156 questionnaires were completed in 2010. Five factors of motivations were extracted after factor analysis and reliability test, including novelty, exploration, family gathering, recovering equilibrium, and socialization. Later, all participants were segmented into two groups based on their motivations, i.e., highly motivated and lower motivated group. These two groups were different on some social demographics and festival participation behaviors. The theoretical and practical implications are discussed