Impact of Multilingual Packaging on Tourism Products of Competence and Warmth: From the Monolingual, Bilingual and Trilingual Perspectives

• Published in: SAGE open 2024-10, Vol.14 (4)
• Main Authors: Yi, Kui, Wu, Yingqi, Liu, Yiying, Li, Xi
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 2158-2440; 2158-2440
• DOI: 10.1177/21582440241300537

In the post-pandemic era, a growing emphasis on elevating the quality of tourism consumption has been observed. This study explores how different language portfolios on product packaging can influence tourists’ perceptions and purchase intentions to promote sustainable consumption. Previous studies on tourism product strategies often addressed national identity, power perception, and stereotypes, but overlooked the fundamental role of multilingual packaging strategies for enterprises and tourists. This study focuses on sake, which combines cultural and natural attributes, as its experimental object. Sub-studies 1, 2, and 3 empirically analyzed how perceptions of competence and warmth are affected by monolingual, bilingual, and trilingual properties of language packaging, respectively, and their impact on tourists’ purchase intentions. The findings suggest that monolingual and bilingual packaging enhances tourists’ competence perception, while trilingual packaging enhances tourists’ warmth perception, thereby stimulating tourists’ positive purchase intentions. Additionally, cultural identity significantly moderates the effectiveness of multilingual packaging strategies. Understanding these dynamics can help tourism enterprises design more effective promotional activities and packaging language strategies for tourists’ preferences. It can also enhance the post-pandemic tourism industry. Plain language summary Impact of multilingual packaging on tourism products of competence and warmth: From the monolingual, bilingual, and trilingual perspectives In this paper, we clarify the mechanism of how different types of language packaging and product attributes influence product perceptions, explore tourists’ preference for the tourism product attributes and their purchase responses. We focus on the tourism products and consider the effectiveness of multilingual packaging strategies according to the packaging language (portfolio) of tourism products and its embodied competence and warmth perceptions. We aim to provide novel theoretical and managerial insights in creating market positioning for tourism products.