La Experiencia de Marca y Sus Efectos em el Comportamiento de los Foliones em el Carnaval de Belo Horizonte

Brand experience is a very important topic for the tourism sector because most deals in this industry are related to services, which contribute highly to tourists' formation of experience. The objective of this work is to elaborate and test a theoretical model about brand experience and its consequences in terms of loyalty of Carnival's revelers and their intention to advertise Carnival by word of mouth. Furthermore, the perception of Belo Horizonte's Carnival experience will be measured, taking into consideration its sensory, affective, behavioral and intellectual components. An online survey questionnaire was applied through social media sites such as Instagram and WhatsApp and 470 valid answers were obtained. The results show that brand experience is formed by the four theoretical dimensions: sensorial experience, affective experience, behavioral experience and intellectual experience. The developed and tested model presented nomological validity and all hypothesis were accepted. It was verified that brand experience impacts loyalty of revelers and word of mouth advertisement significantly. Besides that, loyalty also impacts word of mouth communication. The variance explained for loyalty was 58% and 72% for word of mouth communication.