Literature suggests that the critical advantages of festivals to localities are based around opportunities for generating income, supporting existing businesses and encouraging new entrepreunerial start-ups, as well as generating revenue for governments (Huang et al. 2010). However, the positive impacts of festivals extend beyond income generation and include strengthening rural communities and enriching the quality of small towns’ life (O’Sullivan and Jackson 2002). In small regional towns, where there is not much outstanding cultural activity, a local products festival can mobilize local cultural forces and resources, stimulating creative interventions and planning activities that can affect local development and regeneration processes.
Even though they may be more or less profitable in terms of monetary gains, small scale local products festivals cumulatively diversify local economies, often shape employment policies, and improve management philosophies of local networks. This applies particularly in rural areas, where the involvement of local people in the management and staging of festivals position local actors rather central to economic activities, than marginal or ignored. In this sense, local products festivals can be seen as a catalytic force within local urban and regional economies, not so much as a discrete sector but as a form of “glue” that binds together existing cultural, service, transport, tourism and supply industries (CER 2013).