Abstract
The aim of this study was to examine how customers perceive storytelling at a real local restaurant and to understand how consumption reflects their evaluation by understanding their values. Participants received information from a real local restaurant in the Gangneung area to examine the effects of storytelling and to evaluate their affective attitudes towards local restaurant stories, word-of-mouth intentions, and purchasing intentions using a seven-point Likert scale. A total of 310 consumers were used. A factor analysis was performed to identify consumption value characteristics and factor structure, which consisted economic value, emotional value, and epistemic value. To test whether local restaurant consumers could be classified into homogenous groups based on their consumption values, a three cluster solution was selected, and a Kmeans cluster analysis was performed. As a result, three groups were identified and labeled appropriate for their scores based on each of the consumption values; emotional value-oriented consumers to cluster 1, epistemic value-oriented consumers to cluster 2, and economic value-oriented consumers to cluster 3. An analysis of variance was used to examine the differences in the affective attitudes towards storytelling at the local restaurant, purchasing intentions, and word-of-mouth intentions across the three clusters. The epistemic value-oriented consumers had the highest score for all three variables. In contrast, economic value-oriented consumers had the lowest scores for the three variables. A regression analysis revealed that affective attitudes towards storytelling were significantly affected by these three consumption values. It also showed that positive affective attitudes towards storytelling were associated with higher purchasing intention and word-of-mouth. The significance of this study was to show how customers perceive storytelling at a real restaurant and reflect on their evaluation by understanding their consumption values. As a result, this study examined the potential power of storytelling as an effective marketing communication tool for local restaurants.
