Leisure Consumption: an Israeli Study

ABSTRACT - Consumption of cultural events has become a large industry in many countries. Both the types of such events and their variety have increased. Entertainment is an important component of leisure activities. We define entertainment broadly as: Aall forms of art and culture which is on show or performed for the public.@ Thus, the focus of our study is on movies and musical, dance, theatre performances. Such entertainment can be ongoing or of the special event type and can be targeted toward local audiences or tourists.

Citation:

Aviv Shoham and Maja Makovec Brencic (2003) ,"Leisure Consumption: an Israeli Study", in E - European Advances in Consumer Research Volume 6, eds. Darach Turley and Stephen Brown, Provo, UT : Association for Consumer Research, Pages: 29.

European Advances in Consumer Research Volume 6, 2003      Page 29

LEISURE CONSUMPTION: AN ISRAELI STUDY

Aviv Shoham, University of Haifa, Israel

Maja Makovec Brencic, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia

ABSTRACT -

Consumption of cultural events has become a large industry in many countries. Both the types of such events and their variety have increased. Entertainment is an important component of leisure activities. We define entertainment broadly as: "all forms of art and culture which is on show or performed for the public." Thus, the focus of our study is on movies and musical, dance, theatre performances. Such entertainment can be ongoing or of the special event type and can be targeted toward local audiences or tourists.

Relatively little is known about cultural preferences of consumers in general and Israeli consumers specifically. The present study was designed to bridge three gaps in the literature. First, it is specific to entertainment, rather than to general vacation/travel behavior. Second, unlike previous research, it studies the consumption of entertainment in a newly developed countryBIsrael. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first such academic study in Israel. Third, as will be shown below, it assesses the predictive role of three antecedents (consumer values, consumer susceptibility to interpersonal influence, and role relaxation) to entertainment events’ choice, none of which has been used for this purpose previously.

These antecedents and their impacts are used to derive several implications in the context of cultural events. Specifically, age was a significant predictor of entertainment consumption in Israel. Older Israeli consumers are much more role-relaxed and de-emphasize social attributes. Youngsters are more social- and less time-oriented. Managerially, segmentation and positioning of entertainment events, accompanied with communications tailored for specific age groups of consumers should be the focus in offering a given event. The finding that internal values do not depend on others for fulfillmentBso customers decide according to their individual (inner) values and beliefsBbehooves marketers to use more direct communications ad more individual-oriented persuasion. Third, consumers whose normative CSII is high appreciate the social benefits of entertaining activities more than those whose normative CSII is low. Thus, consumers select events with specific social and functional purposes and should be targeted accordingly. Finally, the methodology used in this paper could be used productively in other cultural surroundings. Since many entertainment offerings cater to locals and tourists, cross-cultural comparisons could be used to identify differences and similarities in buyer behavior, valuable especially in the context of standardization and adaptation of the marketing mix.

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