The relationship between promotion tools applied and behavior changes

After carrying out a detailed analysis on the promotion tools applied by the Krishna-conscious communities and the behaviors taken by the respondents it became clear that connections can be made between the promotion tools the audiences are exposed to and the stage of behavior change they are in.

People in the phase of Precontemplation do not have an intention to change their behavior yet – they either have no knowledge about the religion or do not have the motivation to get more acquainted with it. In this stage the aim is to raise the attention of the people and attempt to attract them to the touristic destination in order to expand their knowledge and increase the level of their engagement. This may happen via introducing physical products and the touristic destination and applying different means, such as personal promotion, fliers or posters, focusing on the most attractive events to convince them to visit. After devotees have managed to attract the people to the touristic destination, they have the opportunity to introduce the religion to them personally – which, as we could see is important, as many respondents

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have indicated the value of personal relationship in getting acquainted with the religion.

Following the first visit the aim is starting to switch from promoting the touristic product to focus on the religious aspects and thereby to achieve the phase of Contemplation, where the audiences already consider the possibility of getting more involved in the religion. In this stage the tools of confirming existing audiences comes into the focus, which are still initiated by the farming communities, but focus not only on the touristic attraction, but also on the religious community. In this phase there is a heavy emphasis on social media tools, especially on Facebook, which is a suitable platform to keep contact with wide audiences from different demographic groups.

Besides maintaining the relationship, these tools aim to introduce the religion to the audiences further and to try to move them to the Preparation phase, where they already start taking certain actions to change their behavior in forms yet less visible to the public. In this phase it is really important to confirm and try to retain those, who have already started acting, therefore the tools of social media are backed up with newsletters to ensure continuous flow of information and communication from other institutions of the Krishna-conscious community – restaurants and universities -, which may foster the lifestyle changes even further.

If the confirmation and retention practices were successful, individuals may move forward to the stage of Action, where they take on further habits, which are more visible to the public, such as clothing and temple attendance;

while also maintaining the behaviors taken before. In this phase the promotion tools do not have such a strong influence anymore, since the integration to the community has already started, however, besides the retaining power of determination and the confirmation of the community, retention tools may still contribute to step into the stage of Maintenance. As the qualitative and quantitative researches have shown, at this level there is not so much

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promotion can still influence, except for highlighting educational opportunities to foster engagement. However, at this stage there are many unofficial, not so promoted forms of supporting maintenance too, which are harder to measure.

Evaluating these, we can conclude that H2 was confirmed, promotion tools can be matched to the different stages of change.

After pairing the sets of promotion tools to the stages of behavior change a third hypothesis was set up assuming that there is a relationship between the stage the individuals are in and the tools they are exposed to, pairwise, as shown in Table 23 (Appendix 11).

Table 23 – The relationship between promotion tools and the stages of behavior change

Stage of behavior change Promotion tools

Precontemplation  Raising the attention of new audience – Touristic and physical products

 Attracting new, interested audience – Traditional promotional methods

Contemplation  Confirming existing audience – Social media of the farming communities

Preparation  Confirming existing audience – Social media of the farming communities

 Retaining existing audience – other institutions and retention

Action  Retaining existing audience – other institutions and retention Maintenance  Retaining existing audience – other institutions and retention

(Source: own edition)

This hypothesis was tested with the help of the Pearson correlation coefficient. As Table 24 shows, there were no data concerning those in the Precontemplation phase, therefore the relationship could not be tested with the exposure to the promotion tools in this stage. For the other four phases of behavior change the hypothesis was confirmed, except for one case:

Preparation and Confirming existing audience. On the other hand

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relationships were discovered between Contemplation and Retaining existing audiences and Action and Maintenance and tools Raising the attention of new audiences too. In the table confirmed relationships are market by a tick, while X represents those occasions, where no significant relationships were observed. The relationships marked with exclamation mark are those cases, where relationship was not assumed, yet significant correlation was discovered between the variables.

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124 Precontemplation Raising the attention

of new audience – Touristic and physical products

No data available X

Attracting new, interested audience – Traditional

promotional methods

No data available X

Contemplation Confirming existing audience – Social

Preparation Confirming existing audience – Social

Action Raising the attention of new audience –

Maintenance Raising the attention of new audience –

The relationship between the promotion tools and the stages of change were positive in all cases. The strongest relationship (r=0.764; p<0.001) was

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observed between Contemplation and Confirming existing audiences, showing that there is a match between the platforms the respondents in the Contemplation stage are the most active in and the promotion tools communities apply to target them. A rather weak medium relationship (r=0.233; p<0.001) also occurred with Retaining existing audiences as well, which shows that those at the Contemplation stage may already be influenced by retention tools, therefore communication concerning educational opportunities may be targeted at them as well.

On the other hand there is no significant relationship (r=0.043; p<0.001) with the promotion tools Confirming existing audiences on the Preparation level; these respondents may be reached via the means of Retention, where a positive medium relationship (r=0.488; p<0.001) was detected.

As discussed before, only a few promotion tools target the audiences on the levels of Action and Maintenance, since at this level the power of the group is more important. Still, there was a medium – though not so strong – positive relationship concerning the tools Retaining existing audiences in both cases (r=0.281; p<0.001 and r=0.373; p<0.001, respectively).

Surprisingly, in both Action (r=0.204; p<0.001) and Maintenance (r=0.347;

p<0.001) stages there was also a medium positive relationship discovered concerning the promotion tools raising the attention of new audiences, however, as discussed in section 5.2.4., this may be attributed to the product sales of rural communities, for which not only the new audiences, but also people already devoted are target groups.

5.5.Types of tourists visiting communities devoted to Krishna