Introduction

Services provided at popular culture destinations are often of intangible nature. Marketing these experience-centric services such as guided tours requires effective communication strategies to help overcome the intangibility and abstractness of the services (Stafford, 1996). Associations to popular culture expressions such as films and TV shows have proven effective in building destination attractiveness (Kim & Long, 2012) and they are viewed as important drivers for economic impact and tourism development (Connell, 2012; Li et al., 2017).

Websites are often the most common environments for consumers to encounter these associations. Service marketing research suggests that such environments can be viewed from an e-servicescape perspective (Harris & Goode, 2010) looking at how different aspects influence consumers' perception and decision-making. However, this stream of research has predominantly examined e-servicescape as one construct (though sometimes a higher order construct) using the survey method; examples include but are not limited to Harris and Goode (2010); Huang et al. (2017); Lee and Jeong (2012); Roy et al. (2019); Tankovic and Benazic (2018); Teng et al. (2018); Tran and Strutton (2020); Wu et al. (2017). While global analyses may be useful, Harris and Goode (2010: 238) stressed that 'their worth is limited as key aspects of the servicescape are often neglected'.

Among the key aspects, an emerging trend is to study new stimuli which are of importance to the industry, for example, aesthetic cues (colour, sound, etc.), design cues (uncluttered screens, fast presentations, etc.), and site security (Mari & Poggesi, 2013). Nevertheless, scholars are calling for more studies researching new forms of value (and constraints) in digital spaces as well as how they affect consumer behaviour (Ballantyne & Nilsson, 2017). This chapter zooms in on a very specific design element of e-servicescape: popular culture-induced visual and verbal cues.