Integrating Fuzzy Delphi and Rough Set Analysis for ICH Festival Planning and Urban Place Branding

Folk festivals and other intangible cultural heritage have received widespread attention, and their socio-cultural value can be used to promote tourism, strengthen local identity, and build city brands. However, it remains unclear how these intangible cultural heritage festivals transform their multi-dimensional and multi-configuration material characteristics into economic benefits and image enhancement. This study proposes a practical decision-making framework aimed at understanding how different festival design and governance strategies can work synergistically under different cultural conditions. Based primarily on a literature review and expert questionnaire survey, this study identified six stable materialized practice modules: productization, spatialization, experientialization, digitalization, branding/communication, and co-creation governance. At the same time, this framework also incorporates two other conditional intervention properties: classicism and novelty. The interactions between these modules shape people’s understanding of intangible cultural heritage festivals. Subsequently, this study used a multimodal national dataset that included official statistics, industry reports, e-commerce and social media data, questionnaires, and expert ratings to construct module scores and cultural attributes for 167 festival case studies. Through rough set analysis (RSA), this study simplifies the attributes and extracts clear “if-then” rules, establishing a configurational causal relationship between module configuration and classic/novel conditions to form high economic benefits and enhance local image. The findings of this study reveal a robust core built around spatialization, digitalization, and co-creative governance, with brand promotion/communication yielding benefits depending on the specific context. This further confirms that classicism reinforces the legitimacy and effectiveness of rituals/spaces and governance pathways, while novelty amplifies the impact of digitalization and immersive interaction. In summary, this study constructs an integrated and easy-to-understand process that links indicators, weights, and rules, and provides operational support for screening schemes and resource allocation in festival event combinations and venue brand governance.