A research on the perceptions, attitudes and recommendation intentions of art gallery visitors: Case of Sakarya

Art galleries are the places where art products are exhibited or sold. These places are obliged to satisfy the needs of people who are interested in art and all art galleries have to increase the number of visitors to fulfill their obligations or grow, regardless of whether it is a nonprofit or a for-profit . Therefore, it is obvious that arts galleries should put emphasis on the marketing activities. Surely, in order to increase the efficiency of these activities, it is inevitable to adopt a scientific approach. However research in marketing field, paid relatively less attention on the studies regarding the art galleries. The purpose of this study is to examine the art gallery visitors' points of views in art, interest in the concept of art, perceptions and attitudes toward art galleries, intentions to recommend and choose the art galleries. All of the scale items were five item Likert type items adopted from the scales previously used and developed by different authors. Application of the study was done in an art gallery located in the city of Sakarya in Turkey during a one month period (28t March 2019- 28th April 2019). Data were analyzed via IBM SPSS 25. According to results of the study, participants who are at the age of 18 and younger, are less interested in the art than the participants who are older than 18. The first branch of art and artist that come into mind of participants are "painting" and "a painter" when asked. Participants prefer attending the art related activities with a friend and they are also mostly informed about the presence of the art gallery by a friend. According to exploratory factor analysis, it was found that items in the data were loaded in three different dimensions in service quality concepts namely; eating and drinking, responsiveness and tangible. It was also found that participants' overall service quality perception was relatively high while most of the participants had also a high level intention to recommend and satisfaction. Additionally, the service quality perceived by men was found the be lower in terms of the tangibles.