Yin, Poon and Su surveyed three hundred and forty-two tourists who had visited the heritage city of Lijiang in China. Coming across the destination’s products back home evokes . The authors find that memory leads to pleasure and a positive mood, to higher , and to greater intention to buy.
The chain is the contribution rather than the shopping. Their conceptual model sets out causal relationships between , travel satisfaction, autobiographical memory, , destination attachment and purchase intention. So attachment to a place is not a fixed residue of a trip but something a reminder can raise again, years after the trip ended.
When tourists return home from a remote destination, it is not uncommon for them to encounter that destination’s products being sold in their hometown. Yin, Poon and Su take that ordinary moment as their subject, on the grounds that autobiographical memory evocation is likely to affect what people then do.
Their study examines the effects of that evocation on behavioral responses, and it does so by building a conceptual model rather than testing a single link. The model examines the causal relationships between product-destination congruity, travel satisfaction, autobiographical memory, evoked pleasure, destination attachment and purchase intention, which is a chain of six things rather than a before and after.
Data came from three hundred and forty-two tourists who had visited the heritage city of Lijiang in China. Lijiang is a specific choice: a heritage destination with recognizable local products. That is what lets the question of whether an object reads as belonging to a place be answered at all.
Three outcomes follow from the evoked memory. Autobiographical memory is found to lead to pleasure and a positive mood, to higher levels of destination attachment, and to greater purchase intentions for the product available in the tourist’s hometown. The order matters: the attachment is downstream of the feeling, not the other way round. Two cautions. This is a survey of visitors to one destination, modeling causal paths from self-reports gathered at one time, and the paper frames its findings as managerial implications.
wat. Seeing the product at home brings back the place, and the attachment comes with it.
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Place attachment is usually studied as something built by being somewhere. Here an object encountered at home reactivates it, so the attachment turns out to be portable rather than located.
How do we know?
Data came from three hundred and forty-two tourists who had visited Lijiang, tested against a conceptual model linking product-destination congruity, travel satisfaction, autobiographical memory, evoked pleasure, destination attachment and purchase intention.
What is still unknown
A survey of tourists to one destination, modeling causal paths from self-reported responses at a single point in time. Purchase intention is also not purchase, and the paper discusses managerial implications, which is the frame it was written for.
Learn something?
Where to next
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