ABSTRACT
Hosting festivals is now commonly used as a promising strategy to market a destination to interested visitors and achieve various socio-economic goals amongst local population. However, fierce competition and programme rigidity have resulted in declining popularity for many long-established festivals. Numerous studies have consistently revealed the utmost significance of “novelty” for a festival to maintain its competitiveness (e.g. Crompton & McKay 1997; Nicholson & Pearce 2001; Van Zyl & Botha 2003), but what constitutes “novelty” and how to programme or co-create “novelty” are not yet adequately explored in the literature. Evidence regarding to what extent programme novelty and management innovation could affect festival attendees’ motivation, behaviours and experience is scarce as well (Carlsen, Andersson, Ali, Jaeger & Taylor 2010; Hjalager 2009). A possible reason for such a major omission is that any innovation takes time to bring about perceptible changes, thus inherently requiring a longitudinal research design, whereas extant festival studies are predominantly cross-sectional.
