The Impact of Maturation and Attitude Importance on Industry Support

Few marketers or social observers doubt the potential for industries to wax and wane in popularity and public support. Researchers have noted how support for industries can shift over time in the face of social change (Crompton, Howard and Var, 2003; Franke, 1994). Sensing and adapting to “sea-changes” in consumer attitude is viewed as one of the keys to marketing success. However, understanding how this change toward an industry occurs remains underdeveloped. The current study examines how public attitudes toward an industry shift over time following a period of dramatic growth. Andrews and Franke (1996) believed that in some cases industry maturation can have a strong effect on the consumer public. Quite a lot of work has gone on in the area of product lifecycle and how growth and maturation of a tourism destination impacts host community attitude toward that industry (Andereck, Valentine, Knopf, and Vogt, 2005; Gursoy and Rutherford, 2004). However, little effort has tracked public responses and looked closely at how attitudes of industry support form and change. This investigation uses resident samples over a ten year span to study how public attitudes toward a region’s tourism industry fluctuate as it matures. A lengthy history of attitude research attempts to explain why some attitudes change and others endure (Krosnick, 1988). The term “attitude” represents a psychological disposition that reflects an enduring positive or negative feeling toward an object or issue (Eagly and Chaiken, 1993). Agarwal and Malhotra (2005) pictured attitude components interacting during formation. The interaction between positive and negative attributes attracted satisfaction researchers, who examined their connection in explaining overall attitude (Mittal, Ross, and Baldasare, 1998; Oliver, 1993). The current study takes a similar tack, exploring how positive/negative attributes of an industry collectively bundle and interact to form a larger overall attitude or meta-judgment of industry support (Bassili, 1996; Petty, 2006). A more detailed perspective of industry attributes that contribute to judgments of support was drawn from work by tourism researchers. Lankford and Howard (1994) developed a scale that assessed host community experiences in a region’s development. Their standardized scale assessed judgments of support by tapping industry-specific positive and negative attributes active in that attitude (Rollins, 1997; Schneider, Lankford and Oguchi, 1997). Positive attributes of the industry included elements that benefited residents (local economy, provision of jobs, service infrastructure etc), whereas negative elements consisted of factors that dirninished the host community (crime, litter, traffic etc). Defining industry support took a different tack, as indicators of this summary attitude described a resident’s willingness to support the industry’s development and use of public resources (taxes, land use etc).