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of intellectual and emotional engagement is involved in all types of value that
Holbrook describes in his framework.
Boerner and Jobst
One empirical study coming out of the marketing
literature that is particularly relevant to the present
inquiry, examines the individual impacts received by
theatre-goers (in a very similar manner as the postevent
survey studies discussed above) along with
more traditional measures of product and service
quality (Boerner and Jobst 2013). Following a preliminary
qualitative study, in which Jobst and Boerner conducted extensive semistructured
interviews with 21 theatre-goers to identify determinants of audience
members’ subjective evaluation of their experiences at a theatre performance
(Jobst and Boerner 2012), the authors test these indicators in a survey study
of audiences at 44 performances at 12 different theatres in German-speaking
countries.
Based on the preliminary study, the researchers identified 30 determinants of
visitors’ subjective assessment of theatre experiences, which they grouped into
eight categories:
S Boerner and J Jobst, 2013, ‘Enjoying theater:
The role of visitor’s response to the performance’,
in Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts
7:4, 391-408.
• General evaluation of the theatre
• Visitor’s mood and expectations
• Perceived artistic quality
• Visitor’s cognitive response
• Visitor’s emotional response
• Visitor’s conative response
• Other visitor’s perceived behaviour
• Servicescape (393)
Boerner and Jobst’s 2013 article primarily focuses on the cognitive, emotional
and conative responses. The authors use the term ‘conative response’ to refer to
a performance’s capacity to incite audience members to take further action, for
example by provoking reflection, motivating them to communicate with others,
or inspiring them to seek further information about specific themes, topics or
people following the production (394).
The analysis of their survey data leads Boerner and Jobst to the conclusion that
factors related to the perceived artistic quality of the performance, in particular
the quality of the staging, play, acting and sets, the fidelity to the original text
(‘werktreue’) and the topicality of the play, are the most important determinants
VALUING ARTS AND CULTURE FROM THE MARKETING PERSPECTIVE 100
UNDERSTANDING the value and impacts of cultural experiences