To What Extent Did the Woodworks Festival Attract People?

Abstract

The Okawa Woodworks Festival, held in spring and autumn every year, is the biggest event in Okawa City. Okawa City, Japan, is famous for its clustered agglomeration of furniture industry. In recent years, Okawa City has been forced to retreat from the industrial scale at the time of its peak by imported furniture made in China and low price large retailers. In Okawa City, various policies have been attempted to revitalize furniture and interior industries. Okawa Woodworks Festival is one of such policies. The purpose of this study is to measure how many visitors usually visit Okawa City and to estimate to what extent visitors are attracted by the Woodworks Festival. Specifically, we devise the method to explicitly estimate the visitor attraction effect of a large event such as the Woodworks Festival, which has never been clearly measured so far, at an individual level, and measure its size actually. To that end, we conducted the on-site questionnaire survey of the festival visitors to ask whether they visited Okawa City with the purpose of attending the festival or with other purposes. First, by restricting the samples to those from the Okawa metropolitan area, we forecasted the number of visitors from that area who visit the city center district of Okawa City with the purpose for attending the Woodworks Festival. This is the estimation of the visitor attraction effect on Okawa metropolitan residents due to the Woodworks Festival, using the on-site weighted visit frequency Poisson model. While this estimation by Poisson model is thought of as based on the comparison of the visitors attracted by the festival purpose with those with usual purposes, we made an ingenuity to create the panel data of the visitors with the festival purpose as though composed of data at two points of time before and after the festival. Using this panel data for the visitors with the festival purpose, we demonstrated that we can determine the visitor attraction spatial area of the Woodworks Festival in terms of travel time distance. By doing this, we show that the area is the circle with the radius of 313.6 min. Furthermore, applying the same method to the analysis of the effect by the TV commercial advertisement, we show that the enlargement effect of TV commercial advertising on the visitor attraction spatial area in terms of travel time distance turns out to increase the area by 42 min.

This chapter is based on the paper of Saburo Saito, Jie Cai, Kosuke Yamashiro, Masakuni Iwami, and Mamoru Imanishi [1], “Measurement of the customer attraction effect of large events: The case of Okawa Woodworks Festival,” presented at the 48th Annual Meeting of Japan Section of the Regional Science Association International (JSRSAI), 2011, which is modified for this chapter.