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Introduction
Scott McCabe
A few years ago, many tourism developers might have been pardoned for thinking that tourism demand was likely to grow almost continuously and that all they had to do was provide the facilities and tourists would flock inā¦ Today, the stagnant world economy, the hugely increased price of energy and fluctuating exchange rates mean that there are no longer any certainties about tourismās growth. Countries, tourism resorts and individual hotels are having to work much harder to fill their beds.
Does this mean that new tourism developments should be discouraged? No, it does not! But it does mean that more resources will be needed for marketing the development throughout its life. If a project is sensibly conceived and adequate marketing budgets are provided, I firmly believe new tourism projects can gain a share of the tourism pie, because marketing works!
(Bonnett 1982: 242)
Introduction
Reading this quote now, it is hard to believe that Bonnett was not writing in the present. Not only does the global context outlined resonate so clearly with the current challenges of the global economy, but also, the marketing sentiments donāt appear so much different from those that continue to drive the tourism industry. What Bonnettās article does not capture is the sense of flux that pervades the field of marketing theory and practice in the current era. Marketing is undergoing a period of great transformation in thought and practice and tourism marketing shares this sense of uncertainty about its future.
Tourists are becoming increasingly sophisticated and knowledgeable. They seem perfectly happy and capable of creating their own itineraries and managing their own tourist experiences. Technology has rendered information search and travel booking processes convenient, cheap and flexible. The digital era has transformed social relations, making it simple for people to create and maintain social bonds with strangers and friends in far-away places. Media habits are also being transformed, to the extent that it is no longer clear whether marketing is having any effects on consumers at all. The old certainties are peeling away one by one. Marketing is in danger of losing its way, senior executives are asking about marketingās relevance to the bottom line, when budgets are being squeezed from every direction.
This begs the question about the purpose of tourism marketing. What are the distinctive features of tourism that differentiate it from other service sectors or product marketing? What does tourism marketing contribute to our understanding of marketing issues? In order to answer some of these questions it is perhaps necessary to understand the context in which tourism marketing developed as a field. It would be facile to try to map the development of the field of tourism marketing from its early beginnings to the current time. However, it is also difficult not to place tourism marketing within a broad historical context.
From an early focus on understanding tourism as a phenomenon of consumer activity from the 1960s onwards, the marketing approach began to take hold, particularly in the American market where marketing issues were addressed even in the earliest issues of the Journal of Travel Research (e.g. Peattie 1968). Early research sought to identify the main sources of available data on travel markets, in an effort to enable better informed marketing strategies to be developed. Many researchers were oriented towards understanding motivations and tourist behaviour (Crompton 1979; Dann 1981; Pearce 1982). In the 1990s dedicated textbooks began to appear, some of which are still available and in print after many editions (e.g. Witt and Moutinho 1994; Middleton 1994). Research became more sophisticated and diffuse. During the 1990s, following the paradigmatic changes in the field of marketing, tourism researchers began to focus on the need for a market orientation, a recognition that marketing should try to understand customer needs and develop meaningful relationships that would drive loyalty.
In the following 20 years to the current time, tourism marketing has become a widely established field of research and scholarly activity with specialist journals such as the Journal of Travel and Tourism Marketing, Journal of Vacation Marketing, with continued developments such as the recent addition of the Journal of Destination Marketing and Management. Whilst generically, it may argued that tourism marketing remains an applied field of research, it is also true that it forms a very sophisticated body of knowledge. This makes the task of compiling a handbook of tourism marketing a very difficult one indeed. The vast wealth of research and the very broad coverage of issues mean that in many ways the choice of topics is in some sense arbitrary.
What I have attempted to do in this work is to focus in on foundational issues that, together with emerging and future research challenges, are important to understand current and future trends, challenges and opportunities, and to try to encourage a critical examination of marketingās role in the wider context of tourism and wider society. Whilst there are a large number of textbooks and other monographs devoted to various aspects of tourism marketing, and an emerging number of handbooks dealing with marketing strategy in tourism for example, there are fewer works that have tried to locate tourism marketing within a scientific context, and position tourism marketing in terms of its distinctive conceptual features, the characteristic methods and frameworks, and to link its main contributions to disciplines and fields. This was the main underpinning aim for this book.
At a very generic level, tourism marketing research can be best described as distorted in terms of its coverage of marketing concepts and fields, often with little emphasis on core marketing topics such as marketing communications. And yet in other aspects, tourism marketing research and scholarship are quite well integrated; place branding is one example. Similarly, tourism marketing academicians have made great strides in some areas, consumer research for example, but it is less obvious that this knowledge has impacted on theorizations of consumer behaviour more widely. Research methods have also been adopted by tourism marketing scholars, but there is often a lag in their uptake, thus it was important to understand how tourism research methods or contexts are useful to theory and method development. Therefore it seemed useful to try to engage with these contributions and gaps. Finally, it was important to address where tourism marketing has come from and where it is going.
Tourism marketing foundations
The handbook is structured into nine sections. The first and last sections each contain two chapters. The introductory part deals with fundamental paradigmatic issues that reflect both shifts in the context of marketing practice (Chapter 2) and our understanding of what constitutes value for tourists (Chapter 3). Xiang (Robert) Li begins by situating the current state of upheaval within the field of marketing within a historical context in Chapter 2. Marketing, born out of classical economic theory, initially concerned with understanding the functions of markets and the nature of value in exchange relationships, has evolved over the last century to become an established socio-economic process. The continued unfolding of technological developments has accelerated change in business innovation and consumer markets, the knowledge economy. The consequential structural changes to social relationships brought about by Internet and digital technology adoption has forced a radical shift in thinking about the function of marketing, taking us back to almost fundamental principles.
These can be summarized firstly, as the general shift in thinking about the role of marketing in this new knowledge economy, that firms should focus their energies on bringing together dynamic, specialized competences, knowledge and skills to create and deliver service, which should be the basis for all business activity, the new service-dominant logic (SDL) (Vargo and Lusch 2004). Secondly, a fundamental principle of SDL is that customers should also be treated as operant resources, bringing their skills, experience and knowledge into the relationship with firms, and it is through this process and only through this process that value can be created, in use. Value is co-created jointly and contextually by the company and the customer (Prahalad and Ramaswamy 2004). The first part of the book examines how these fundamental ideas in marketing have been and can be related to tourism. This is critical because intuitively and fundamentally tourism is a consumer experience that is primarily based on simultaneous production and consumption, context-specific and collaboratively produced by tourists and service employees.
In Chapter 2, Li outlines the main propositions of SDL, and discusses the links between this and related marketing concepts. He highlights some of the criticisms placed on this emerging set of ideas, and goes on to assess the implications within the context of destination marketing, arguing that DMOs have to reorient their thinking and activity to meet the demands of consumers in the future. However, these implications have resonance for all sectors of tourism marketing. In Chapter 3, Prebensen examines the basis of tourist experience to understand how value is conceived and perceived by tourists through their interactions with people and places. Thinking about tourists as active agents, rather than the passive receptors of actions provided by companies has a crucial consequence for tourism marketing research and yet there has been limited attention from the tourism marketing academy on the value creation process. However, this is dramatically changing with a slew of new studies emerging in the literature. Prebensen defines and outlines the literature in value co-creation and discusses critical issues such as the degree of involvement between the actors, the nature of tourist value as autotelic, and driven by intrinsic goals. She argues that firms should understand the types of core values desired by tourists from their experiences, and dramatize their service offers to meet those value expectations.
The themes explored in the two chapters in Part 1 resonate throughout the other parts and chapters in this volume. This indicates both the desire for tourism researchers to engage with foundational marketing theory and practice, and also a sense of the applicability of these ideas to tourism marketing contexts. Tourists are knowledgeable actors, who, particularly in the developed world, are eminently capable of deploying their skills to use technology to create their own travel experiences. Tourism firms must look beyond the marketing management perspective to establish what types of resources they can bring to facilitate experience value for consumers. This will require a more critical engagement with conceptual and broader scale issues relating to tourism marketingās effects on society and or social processes.
The last section, Part 9, also contains two chapters under the umbrella of āreflectionsā. In the first Fesenmaier and Zheng Xiang (Chapter 40) plot the fundamental shifts in marketing thought and practice over the last two decades, a period of frenetic growth in marketing research amidst the context of deep socio-cultural change. Fesenmaier and Xiang identify key issues that will drive future marketing research such as the need for measurement and evaluation in the era of big data, what travel in the network does to transform tourist experience, and customized marketing. This is followed by the final chapter, Moutinho, Ballantyne and Rate (Chapter 41), that looks forward to assess how futurecast can help tourism marketers and researchers to understand key issues for the future. The authors reiterate some key themes expressed both in the first part of the book, such as prosumption, and the imperative to co-create tourism experiences to maximize consumer value. They emphasize the shifting power dynamics between consumers and firms and stress the diminishing impact of brands and conventional marketing. In many ways, these four chapters provide a critical lens which frames the issues discussed in the following parts.
The macromarketing perspective
Part 2 of this book explores macromarketing issues and tourism. Macromarketing is used here to mean the impacts of marketing on society, and the consequences of society on marketing systems in tourism (Schulz 2007). These issues raised in the chapters in Part 2 are fundamental to understanding how tourism marketing might be more successful in the future, and also from the perspective of research, how the context of tourism marketing might influence or otherwise relate to the main scientific community of marketing. Marketers in the future must act responsibly and demonstrate those actions to their stakeholders and the wider community. In tourism it is accepted that the industry depends on finite cultural and natural resources for its success, and that in terms of selling tourism experiences, there is a need to represent services appropriately, since the consequences of not acting responsibly are very high. Yet the highly competitive and fragmented business environment of the sector, the perishable nature of the product and fickle consumer demand perhaps dictates an orientation to short-termism and profit today mentality. Conterminously, the actions of the tourism industry are inseparably bound to wider sociopolitical forces of power. Hence there is a need to try to understand how and what tourism marketing contributes to the wider debates about marketingās role in society. The chapters in Part 2 aim to explore these issues.
Firstly, in Chapter 4, Clarke, Hawkins and Waligo interleave ideas from marketing, sustainable development, tourism studies, and sustainable marketing to debate the relationships between marketing, sustainability and responsible tourism. They outline the reasons why firms become involved in responsible tourism and contextualize their discussion in the dominant social paradigm of the āWestā, a culture of consumerism, individualism and anthropocentrism that constrains the actions of sustainable marketers to merely reproducing rather than challenging the established norms. However the authors go on to provide examples from the micromarketing perspective and highlight new directions and strategies to challenge the status quo.
In Chapter 5, Shaw, Barr and Wooler pick up one of the themes mentioned in Chapter 4, that of social marketing. The tourism industry often generates a rhetoric of being fixated on second guessing next trends, and justifying this as providing what consumers want, and yet this stance overlooks the powerful role the industry plays in generating these appetites in the first place and in encouraging behaviour that might best be characterized as self-indulgent. Social marketing has rarely been applied to tourism, and yet offers potential to understand how consumersā attitudes, desires and behaviours might be ānudgedā into more positive directions. Shaw and colleagues discuss the political and practical issues surrounding this approach. Chapter 6 continues this theme in the context of the complexities of the relationships between public relations (PR) and tourism.
LāEtang and Lugo-Ocando (Chapter 6) argue for the fundamental dependency between tourism and reputation, implicitly linked to the importance of image, and in particular the organic forms of image production. LāEtang and Lugo-Ocando outline the main debates surrounding PR and explain how it has evolved into a broader strategic function from its earlier context as a function of micromarketing. However, the inclusion of this chapter in relation to tourism macromarketing is due to the positioning of the discussion of the ethicality of tourism-reputation systems, as they have developed into complex networks of actors and socio-political dynamics that orchestrate media information in an effort to attract tourists through reputation management, largely incorporating varying levels of government. Similarly, the authors argue that the emergence of digital media and social networks create a need for PR to rethink its research approaches and conceptual frameworks to develop multidisciplinary understandings and approaches to reputation management in the future that have critical implications for tourism firms and destination managers. What this chapter ably demonstrates is that communication is inextricably linked to power. This theme is the main focus of Chapter 7.
Caruana (Chapter 7) examines the role of marketing communications in producing discourses, and shows how tourism marketing has been directed towards the reproduction of power dynamics. Tourism marketing communications are social constructions, and as such they shape information in particular ways. This has been recognized as one of the main contributions of tourism social science within a marketing context, since tourism marketing texts and images have been shown to actively constitute broader social discourses of hedonism, alterity, authenticity, mythological places and post-colonial power relations for example. Caruana goes on to discuss how these cultural texts produce sets of power relationships between to...
