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Abstract |
The marketing discipline offers suitable and well-established constructs for viewing outdoor recreation from the demand perspective, namely experiential consumption (Holbrook and Hirschman 1982) and consumer value (Woodruff 1997, Holbrook 1999). Although non-commercial, visiting national parks represents consumption in terms of acquiring experiences; visitors immerse themselves in an experiential, nature-based context to derive personal experiences that provide value. The concept of consumer value has been established in marketing for long, but self-organized and independent visits to national parks represent a new area of application. This approach, viewing park visits through the eyes of the visitors, combines the setting attributes and individuals activities to their desired personal outcomes. Thus, it is similar to the Outcomes Focused Management approach (Driver, 2008) as well as the Recreation Preference Scale (Driver, 1983) and Recreation Opportunity Spectrum (Clark and Stankey, 1979) frameworks, but provides an integrated outlook by comprising also the underlying universal values unlike conventional outdoor recreation research. |
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