Festival quality, self-connection, and bragging

Festivals provide opportunities for experiential consumption, attracting both first-time and repeat visitors. However, current understanding of the perceptual and behavioural differences between these groups remains incomplete. This study investigates how experiential purchase quality influences experience self-connection and braggart word-of-mouth, for both first-time and repeat visitors, using a mixed-method approach. The qualitative (n = 32) and quantitative (n = 909) results together reveal that the combinations of experiential purchase quality dimensions stimulating experience self-connection and braggart word-of-mouth in repeat visitors differ significantly from those for first-time visitors, emphasising the need for festival managers to pay close attention to how different visitor groups perceive and prioritise experiential purchase quality dimensions. The findings thus extend current understanding of how braggart word-of-mouth emerges in an experiential consumption context.