Advances in Tourism Destination Marketing

Managing Networks

Metin Kozak, Juergen Gnoth, Luisa L.A Andreu

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9781138880627
• eBook ISBN: 9781135218904
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Business

This volume provides original insight into the operational opportunities, challenges and constraints in managing Tourism Destination Marketing. It explores how the various tourist destination systems including tourist, places (as seen by the tourist), public and private tourism organisations and the social and physical environment can effectively communicate and co operate together at a profit for each.

Advances in Destination Marketing offers a comprehensive review of a wide range of aspects related to marketing tourism products including networks in destinations, consumer experiences in destinations, destination branding, destination image, events in destinations and destination tourism products. Throughout the book a network analysis perspective is applied to offer alternative solutions of how each system can share network knowledge and system knowledge so profits can be created effectively and maximised. The exploration of new topics such as Destination Networks and Destination Branding as well as original international empirical research and case studies from well known researchers in the area, provides new thinking on Marketing Tourism Destinations.

The relevance of the arguments and the salient conclusions are valuable in the study of an ever dynamic and burgeoning industry. This stimulating volume will be of interest to higher level students, academics, researchers within Tourism and practitioners in the industry.

Part I
Destination marketing and management

1
Research in tourism marketing

An analysis of topics and methodologies

Enrique Bigné, Alejandro Alvarado Herrera and Isabel Sánchez García

Introduction

Tourism has been one of the very last sectors to assume a marketing approach focused on the consumer, and therefore marketing researchers have been concerned about the identification of key trends in tourism marketing only since the last decade (Bigné, 1996, 2004; Bigné, Andreu & Sánchez, 2005; Mattila, 2004; Oh, Kim & Shin, 2004) in line with the recent development of tourism as a scientific discipline (see Jafari, 2005). The continuation and updating of past efforts is required since marketing’s scope is still evolving (Day & Montgomery, 1999; Kerin, 1996; Oh et al., 2004), as clearly illustrated by the most recent definition of the term “marketing” adopted by the American Marketing Association (AMA, 2005; Keefe, 2004) and its already discussed limitations (Grönroos, 2006; Palmer, Lindgreen & Vanhamme, 2005).

Some papers have identified various tourism marketing trends in the recent past (Bowen & Sparks, 1998; Mattila, 2004; Oh et al., 2004). Although these are very valuable contributions to the tourism marketing literature, a long range perspective of the evolution of the field cannot be determined since it is not possible to establish a complete temporal link to trace it. Xiao and Smith (2006a, b) provide such a temporal perspective but they do not focus specifically on marketing but on tourism and hospitality in general. Therefore, the present research is focused on identifying research trends in tourism marketing through content analysis of the papers published in the two top journals on tourism, Annals of Tourism Research (ATR) and Tourism Management (TM), during the period 1995–2006, intending to be an extended update on Bigné (2004) and Bigné et al. (2005), and establishing a complementary and comparative frame to those.

Literature review

According to Zhao and Ritchie (2007), the growing acknowledgement of the scientific status of tourism has led to a parallel increase in research interest in the tourism academic community. They identify two main perspectives to deal with this type of research. The first aims to assess and rank tourism journals, and it is usually based on tourism experts’ perceptions collected by means of a survey. The second approach focuses on tourism researchers, trying to identify “the most frequently contributing scholars and institutions in terms of publication productivity in a given time frame” (p. 476).

An additional stream of this kind of research that can be identified within tourism literature is based on the recognition and analyses of trends (Van Doren & Heit, 1973) emerging from longitudinal observations of the changes of topics and research methodology used by the authors (Xiao & Smith, 2006b) such as those that have been made in the field of hospitality (Baloglu & Assante, 1999; Crawford & McCleary, 1992; Xiao & Smith, 2006a, b) and in the field of tourism marketing and management (Bowen & Sparks, 1998; Buhalis & Law, 2008; Mattila, 2004; Oh et al., 2004; Pike, 2002).

Effectively, as Xiao and Smith (2006b) point out, state-of-the-art tourism research can be a useful source of hypotheses on the evolution of tourism knowledge because the empirical study of the content of the published papers provides “hard data” to obtain verifiable and grounded conclusions. Therefore, researching published trends is useful for scholars as well as for journal managers because what we are researching and publishing and how we are doing it is an attractive issue for future researchers and for tourism departments to establish research priorities.

Focusing on research trends in tourism marketing, Mattila (2004) made a systematic analysis based on the consumer behavior articles published during 2003 in 13 well-known tourism and hospitality journals with the aim of identifying key trends on the subject. The author found that the Internet was a relevant topic for hospitality researchers, followed by service encounters, price issues, loyalty and shopping behavior. As far as tourism researchers are concerned, studies mainly deal with destination marketing, segmentation and decision making. Finally, in both subfields, survey was found to be by far the most common methodology, whereas researchers were reluctant to use experimental designs.

Oh et al. (2004), based on Bowen and Sparks’ (1998) work, analyzed the content of the marketing papers published during 2002–03 in eight tourism and hospitality oriented journals. The marketing topics that had received more attention in the hospitality and tourism literature were market segmentation and positioning, followed by satisfaction, complaining and recovery behavior. Relationship marketing and new technologies issues had also received some attention, while the least studied topics were those related with social responsibility, physical distribution, theory and philosophy of science and special marketing applications. Oh et al. found that most of the studies (91 percent) were empirical, based on survey methodology (63.7 percent).

Although the previous works provide very useful insights in tourism marketing research, they focus on a narrow temporal period. Thus, the main purpose of this study is to analyze the evolution in tourism marketing research within two international top journals of tourism: ATR and TM, considering a broad longitudinal perspective. We selected these journals because they are the two best ranked journals of tourism according to the recent research of McKercher, Law and Lam (2006) on the topic. More specifically this research aims to fulfill four objectives. First, to identify the trends in the number of tourism marketing papers included in TM and ATR through the last 12 years, both at the global and at the journal level. Second, to understand the evolution of the researched topics in tourism marketing published in the previous journals throughout the last 12 years. Also to recognize the most studied tourism subsectors throughout the last 12 years and their research trends. And, finally, to identify the most common methodologies used by tourism marketing researchers and their trends through the last 12 years.

Methodology

Content analysis methodology allows the symbolic content of communications to be evaluated in a quantitative, objective, systematic and reliable manner (Kolbe & Burnett, 1991). Its main characteristics are: (a) clear rules and classification procedures, (b) the adequate selection and training of the judges, (c) pilot testing of the categories, (d) the independence and autonomy of the coders and (e) the establishment of ad hoc reliability indexes (Bigné, 1999; Kolbe & Burnett, 1991) such as those proposed by Holsti (1969) and Perreault and Leigh (1989), among others. In addition, the use of more than two judges and the solution of discrepancies based on majority rules increase the objectivity of the analysis (Perreault & Leigh, 1989). Finally, if content analysis is used to replicate and to extend previous studies, as is the case here, the same procedure and classification scheme are recommended (Stern & Resnik, 1991).

Following the above recommendations, we employed a two step approach in this work. First, we carried out Content Analysis on the 190 papers published from 2004 to 2006 in ATR and TM that were identified as “marketing tourism focused” by three judges. The abstracts of the 404 featured papers published in TM and ATR from 2004 to 2006 were sent to the judges and they were asked to identify those focused on tourism marketing. As a result, the judges selected 190 papers as the universe of study corresponding to that period. The full text of the 190 papers was then sent to the judges within a database that included an electronic form designed ad hoc to evaluate the following variables: main and specific topic and, if applicable, subtopic; specific tourism subsector addressed in the paper; methodological approach of the paper; data collection techniques employed in the research; statistical treatment of data; and quantitative techniques used to analyze the data (if applicable).

Classification of general and specific topics and subtopics is based on the Journal of Marketing’s classification scheme. Once the judges ended their evaluations, their opinions were compared to determine the reliability of the analysis. The agreement indexes achieved were higher than the minimal acceptable standard of 0.8 (Perreault & Leigh, 1989; Riffe, Lacy & Fico, 2005). Those related to the Main theme variable showed the highest values: 0.874 (Holsti, 1969) and an Index of reliability Ir = 0.912 (Perreault & Leigh, 1989) for 95 percent confidence limits (0.889–0.937), while the lowest were those related to the Specific theme variable: 0.827 (Holsti, 1969) and Ir = 0.904 (Perreault & Leigh, 1989) for 95 percent confidence limits (0.878–0.929). After establishing the reliability, the judges had to meet to try to agree on the papers where discrepancies persisted after the first round of coding. The final database included 62 papers published in ATR and 128 from TM.

The second step of the methodology encompasses integration of data from 2004 to 2006 with the results obtained in previous research by Bigné (2004) and Bigné et al. (2005) to obtain a broader longitudinal perspective (from 1995 to 2006). Thus, the general database comprises a total of 382 papers; o...

Table of contents

• Routledge advances in tourism
• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Contributors
• Preface
• Part I Destination marketing and management
• Part II Destination branding
• Part III Destination networks
• Part IV Vacation decision making and choice
• Part V Consumer experiences and perceptions
• Index