Incremental Consumption and the Purchase of Experiential Products: An Investigation of Gulf Arabs' Holiday Tourism Behaviour.

This research sought to examine the appropriateness, of general consumer behaviour models and the decision-making processes which they advance, to purchases of products of an experiential nature. An examination of the existing literature on 'goods' and 'services' and of general consumer behaviour models concludes that these models disregard purchases of an experiential nature since their major preoccupation is with decision-making in the context of commodities rather than with products which incorporate commodity- transforming and interpersonal activities. In order to develop an understanding of consumer behaviour with respect to experiential products, research was carried out to examine the way in which an example of such a purchase, tourism, is undertaken. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with a sample of 328 Gulf Arab holiday tourists to the United Kingdom to investigate their holiday destination purchase behaviour. Non-metric multidimensional scaling was used to uncover different holiday behavioural patterns and correspondence analysis was employed to give a more detailed picture of particular aspects of Gulf Arabs' holiday behaviour. The principal finding to emerge from this study is that the purchase of high-expenditure experiential products involves a degree of perceived risk, a risk that cannot be reduced through sampling the product and which consumers choose not to reduce through extensive information search. Therefore, consumers attempt to reduce the risk associated with the purchase through what is termed 'cautious and incremental consumption'. A model of cautious and incremental consumption, based on a trade-off between novelty and familiarity, is offered, which, it is argued, provides a more realistic framework for understanding purchases of experiential products