Exploring the West End: Theatregoers’ Cultural Consumption and London’s City Marketing

Although it is obvious that cultural products have their charms to attract people, it is undeniably clear that tourism is one of the tools to boost their success, leading to the emergence of cultural tourism. Cultural tourism creates massive benefits for both a macro and micro level, for instance, job opportunities, sustainable safeguardsfor heritages, urban development, and more (“Cutting Edge | Bringing cultural tourism back in the game”, 2021). There are many ways to create success in cultural tourism, and city marketing is one of the most reliable tools for it. However, several issues have put the industry on hold and changed the atmosphere of overall tourism such as the COVID-19 pandemic, digitalisation, the notion of Brexit, and more. Therefore, this is an opportune moment to explore the presence of cultural products in tourism, the importance of city marketing strategies, and how tourism could move on from this point. Hence, it leads to the research question reads what are the notable consumption behaviours of the West End theatregoers in different cultural products, namely museums, galleries, music, dance, fashion, exhibition, festival, film, literature, heritage, and architecture in London and how could they be useful in determining city marketing strategies? This research has been done in a quantitative style, with the use of the self-completion questionnaire which was distributed to various online platforms such as West End fans’ Reddit boards and Facebook group. This research contains five main issues: education backgrounds and the sense of familiarity, consumers’ behaviours on cultural consumptions, digitalisation in cultural and creative industries, willingness to travel, and cultural tourism in London. As a result, some outcomes were useful in constructing city marketing strategies that could be beneficial for London’stouristic field. The crucial points are the popularity of musical theatre among theatregoers, the importance of marketing through broadcasting and social media, the incomparable sense of physical experiences’ realness over online consumption, and the importance of other cultural products such as museums to the city’s tourism. This research has been conducted in the lights of being a resourceful study for future research and intends to be a part of sustaining and improving cultural and creative sectors, especially in the tourism field, the commercialised performing arts industry, and urban city development.