An Investigation into the Motivations for Attendance at the Edinburgh’s Christmas Market

Abstract

The Edinburgh’s Christmas Market is a six-week long seasonal event, located in Princes Street Gardens. The market showcases different cultural food and drink, display unique gifts and stalls and provide activities for the entire family (Visit Scotland 2021). The key aim for this paper explores the motivations for the attendance at the Edinburgh’s Christmas Market, with objectives relating to the appeal of the market and subsequent consumer behavioural intentions. There is a substantial number of motivational studies discussing a variety of events; in particular, festivals are a popular topic area for academic research and has significant relevance to three theoretical frameworks, especially Dann’s (1977) Push and Pull concept. However, studies lack investigation into events such as Christmas markets. The literature is very restricted with only a number of studies discussing the motives and behavioural intentions of Christmas markets in Europe, which has consequently left a wide gap in the literature to close. After a thorough examination of previous literature, a discussion of recurring and event-specific motives and subsequent behavioural intentions was developed in the literature review. This provided a detailed basis for influencing ideas and methodology used for this paper with particular reference to Gelder and Robinson (2009) and Lončarić et al. (2020). A quantitative approach was chosen, specifically a self-administered questionnaire, distributed via social media. However, there were limitations due to the global pandemic and chosen sampling technique. The overall findings identified surprising results with the event-specific motive, festive atmosphere, identified as the most important factor and the common recurring motive of escapism/relaxation as one of the least important factors. Secondly, future behavioural intentions results showed predictability with the majority of respondents likely to revisit the markets again. Furthermore, the results contribute to a deeper understanding of why visitors attend the Edinburgh’s Christmas Market and present opportunities for future research.