STUDY DISSERTATION | The role of chefs and the culinary experience in regional attractiveness in light of new consumer expectations

SUMMARY

François DHALLUIN - Master 2 Public Management - Attractiveness and New Territorial Marketing - Academic year 2019/2020

The study raises the issue of the different roles played by Chefs in the service of their territory. Exploring both scientific and lay readings, the author begins with an overview of the three revolutions at work in the food sector: consumer mistrust, consumer empowerment and technological change. He then presents the challenges of culinary tourism, focusing his research on the global culinary experience, and profiles the foodie, the gourmet neo-consumer who is the target of the gourmet tourism market. In this way, he gradually identifies the different traits of a multi-talented professional whose activities and projects serve his own interests as much as those of his region. Secondly, using a qualitative methodology and data triangulation, the author confronts, in an unprecedented way, these elements of research with seven Chefs from Hauts-de-France, interviewed in the course of a long exchange.

Highlighting that the literature gives a diffuse image of these different roles, confirmed by the Chefs themselves, the author analyzes the results of his research by first conceptualizing the forces acting on Chefs through Porter's matrix of competitive advantages (Porter, 1985). He then breaks them down into eight major roles, each of which contributes to the development of their territory's attractiveness.

On this new, simplified basis, the author sets out a number of managerial recommendations aimed at improving territorial decision-makers' overall understanding of the scope of action of Chefs in attractiveness: reinforcing the place of Chefs in the governance of territorial projects, supporting the development of projects led by Chefs in the service of territorial development and culinary tourism in particular, and guiding them along the path of the customer experience.

Finally, considering that the culinary experience is an as yet ill-defined but essential tool in attractiveness strategies and in the dialogue between chefs and attractiveness players, the author attempts to clarify the drivers of the culinary experience by studying customer benefits based on the work of Arnould, Price & Zinkhan (2004), by proposing a matrix of the culinary experience through the customer approach, based on the work of Pine & Gilmore (1999), and suggests, by way of example, that a comparison be made to study the driving forces behind the most surprising culinary experiences on offer in the world today.