Self-Congruity and Wine Tourism Behaviour

Abstract

Self-congruity theory proposes that part of consumer behaviour is determined by an individual’s comparison of the image of themselves to the image of a product/brand, or to the stereotype of a typical user of the brand (Sirgy, 1986). Self-congruity models have been used in a variety of product branding applications; however, limited research has been conducted within the service industries. Services are intangible making them difficult to evaluate until the moment of consumption. Hence, decision making is often based on cues such as the image of the service or users of the service (Kleijnen, de Ruyter, & Andreassen, 2005). As a result, selfcongruity theory is very applicable to services due to the unique characteristics of services and its experiential nature. In particular, there is a lack of evidence within the tourism literature on the effect of self-congruity on tourists’ intentions or motivations to visit a destination (Boksberger, Dolnicar, Laesser, & Randle, in press; Bosnjak, Sirgy, Hellriegal, & Maurer, in press; Litvin & Goh, 2002; Sirgy & Su, 2000). This thesis focuses on a niche market, wine tourism. The number of wineries with cellar doors open to the public over the last 5 years has increased by 37.3 % to 1,647 wineries in 2010 within Australia (Winebiz, 2010a). The majority of these wineries are reliant on wine tourists for their wine sales. Actual wine visitors during this same period had minimal growth. In fact, there was no growth for domestic overnight wine visitors, whilst domestic day visitors had an average growth of 3%, and international visitors an average of 3% growth (Tourism Research Australia, 2010). Purchase and visitation behaviour relevant in tourism has often centred on finding answers to what, where and how tourists buy rather than why (Beerli, Meneses, & Gil, 2007). As a result, a lot of tourism research focuses on functional attributes with little attention to value expressive attributes of a destination, such as the image of a destination (Chon & Olsen, 1991) or destination visitor image. Within the tourism context, Sirgy and Su (2000) hypothesised that the greater the match between the destination visitor image and the tourists self-image, the more likely that the tourist would have a favourable attitude toward that destination, and the more likely that the tourist would visit the destination.