Examining Participant’s Perception of SPICE Factors of Metaverse MICE and Its Impact on Participant’s Loyalty and Behavioral Intentions

ABSTRACT

The COVID-19 pandemic has made most MICE (an acronym that stands for Meeting, Incentive travel, Convention and Exhibition) events postponed or canceled but some are held as online and virtual, or as hybrid events combining online and offline format. In recent years, evolved from the physical MICE events, metaverse-based MICE events are spot-lighted as the participants can indirectly participates in the virtual world called metaverse through avatars, the virtual self. As various metaverse contents are developed based on advanced technology, the MZ (millennials and Generation Z) generation, who proficiently handle digital platforms, accepts the virtual world as a part of reality, and enjoys new experiences (Hwang, Media Issue Trend 456–15, [3]). The purpose of this study is to investigate which factors of the metaverse-based MICE events affect the participants’ loyalty and intention to attend the MICE events and provide empirical data for establishing an effective metaverse-based MICE marketing strategy. To do that this study adopted SPICE(Seamlessness, Presence, Interoperability, Concurrence, Economy) model of metaverse suggested by Kim and Shin (S.K. Kim, B.H. Shin, Metaverse new opportunity. Vegabooks (2021)). A total of valid responses collected from MICE industry stakeholders were investigated. The findings of this study identified that among five dimensions of SPICE model, Seamlessness, Presence, and Economy factors have statistically significant influence on participants’ loyalty of the event while only Presence and Economy factors have significant influence on intention to attend the event. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.