Art, Tourism Experience, and Consumer Metaphoria: Extended Abstract

In recent times, experiential design has become prevalent in tourism services to enhance consumer engagement (Ritchie 2009). Well-known examples in the USA, on a large scale, are Disney theme parks and the Las Vegas Strip and, on a smaller scale, American Girl Stores and Cabela’s Stores. In this chapter we seek to explore how consumer’s interactions with art works contribute to experiential tourism design. We refer to these interactions as consumer metaphoria, meaning how the deep metaphors of consumer experiences are revealed in their engagement with art. The study uses the fact that consumers interact with artwork in a symbolic expressive way, guided by deep metaphors. Metaphors are universal orientations of mental processes through which one thing is understood in terms of another (Zaltman 1997). Deep metaphors are an unconscious viewing lens of consumers that affect how they process and react to information or a stimulus (Zaltman and Zaltman 2008). They manifest themselves in surface metaphors used in everyday conversation. Deep metaphors reveal as well as construct consumers’ emotional states.