Movie Theatres in an Experience Economy: A quantitative study of how additional experience to a movie theatre visit impact emotions and attitude from the consumers' perspective

Abstract: With the present changes in the film industry, and the experience economy at hand, it is of interest for the movie theatres to develop new ways to enable people to watch movies. This quantitative study explores how additional experience to a movie theatre visit can affect emotions and attitudes. It also investigates if Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) can be seen as an experience and thereby used as an experience dimension for a movie theatre visit. An online questionnaire was used to collect data and to investigate (1) how consumers react to different movie theatre experiences and (2) if consumers perceived CSR as an experience. The thesis also investigates if personality can have an explanatory value on attitude. The experiment presents three movie theatre offers with additional experience based on three dimensions: intellectual, escapist/behavioural and CSR. The results suggest that across all three dimensions, added experience leads to higher evoked emotions and attitudes, contrary to the control group. Moreover, the findings indicate that CSR is seen as an experience and can be used as an experience dimension for a movie theatre visit. The escapist/behavioural dimension implied for the largest reaction on emotions and the CSR dimensions showed the highest mean in attitude.