Abstract
Phillip Kotler's traditional definition of a product (1997) includes anything that can be offered to a market that might satisfy a demand. This large definition embraces goods, services, retail stores, persons, ideas and also places. Place marketing usually concerns countries, regions and big cities. But increasingly, socially isolated areas use place marketing as well. For these towns festivals are probably the most powerful tool to exploit in order to market their place. Thus, the number of local or community events has increased rapidly over the last twenty years in the US and Europe. Janiskee (1996, p. 404 cited in Allen et al. 2005) defines community events as “family-fun events that are considered ‘owned' by a community because they use volunteers services from the host community, employ public venues such as streets, parks and schools and are produced at the direction of local government agencies or nongovernmental organisations such as service clubs, public safety or business associations.”Community festivals help cultivating local tourism. The new people it attracts bring more spending so that it contributes to the development of the local economy. But the benefits of a community festival are not only economic. Yeoman et al. (2005) argued that any events have also other impacts especially sociocultural ones. This paper focuses on those aspects of social benefits defined in terms of “the residents' attitudes to the local area” (Wood 2006, p. 165) through the examination of several examples of community festivals in the US, the UK and in France.
