Do Rich Sensory Narrative Cues Affect Audiences’ Food Travel Vlog Narrative Transportation, Attitude, and Food Destination Visit Intention?

Liu Hutchinson, Wei (2022) Do Rich Sensory Narrative Cues Affect Audiences’ Food Travel Vlog Narrative Transportation, Attitude, and Food Destination Visit Intention? Doctoral thesis, Northumbria University.

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Abstract

User-generated travel vlog content is one of the information sources that influence pre-travel decisions and watching experiences. Food travel vlogs provide audiences with not only rich visual and auditory stimuli evoking their “daydreaming” in destinations but also provide them with user-generated original narrative travel stories. Applying the theories of embodied cognition as the research approach, the purpose of the current study is to explore the influence of food travel vlog scripts on audiences’ food sensory experience and behavioural intention. A stimulus-based survey is conducted to examine the influence of rich sensory script-induced virtual food sensory experience. Mental imagery processing and narrative transportation theory are incorporated into an integrated model that illustrates how mental imagery affects narrative transportation, post-attitude, behavioural involvement with food, intention to taste and visit intention. Three hundred and fifty-four questionnaires were collected via Amazon Turk Mechanism and structural equation modelling is adopted to analyse the data. The results show that mental imagery quantity and modality have positively influenced audiences’ feeling of being hooked, and mental imagery quantity, modality and valence have a positive influence on audience attitude. The feeling of being hooked has a direct positive influence on visit intention. The post-attitude indirectly positively influences visit intention via food involvement and intention to taste. The results also show that preattitude and familiarity negatively moderate two sets of relationships, mental imagery and being hooked, mental imagery and post-attitude. Craving positively moderates food involvement, intention to taste and visit intention. Last but not the least, the significant 17 influence of the co-variants such as gender, novelty seeking, food neophobia and prior experience are also correlated to the feeling of being hooked and post-attitude. Based on these findings, a range of recommendations is proposed.

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