Conclusion and suggestions
for future study This study offers an important theoretical contribution to the literature including an amalgam of the effectiveness of celebrity writer endorsement on CBBE and destination attachment in the festival tourism literature. By combining literature on festival tourism and consumer brand equity, this study identified a set of celebrity attributes that help to explain visitors’ brand equity of the festival and attachment to the festival destination. The multidisciplinary approach adopted in this study allows for a comprehensive understanding of the literary festival tourism, forming the basis for further research and conceptual elaboration. Thus, it is believed this study has a valuable contribution to this field because it applied the multi-faceted concepts of celebrity endorsement and the CBBE model to aid in understanding a festival’s brand and attachment to the host society. However, it has some limitations. Firstly, brand loyalty has been measured using affective and cognitive items (Lee et al., 1997, 2012; Nam et al., 2011; Wang et al., 2018). Thus, a future study needs to compare the efficacy of two different measures. Second, it did not analyze the interrelationships among festival brand awareness, perceived quality, and festival brand image. Some studies have indicated that brand awareness and brand image influence brand loyalty through perceived quality (Chen & Myagmarsuren, 2010; Hyun & Kim, 2011; Im et al., 2012; Kladou & Kehagias, 2014). As a consequence, future studies should empirically investigate whether there is a mediating role of perceived quality or brand image within the CBBE model.
