Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
7
Discourse and power in
tourism communications
Robert Caruana
Introduction
Understanding tourism as a marketing process is a matter of perspective (Tribe 2009). A common,
if not
the
common view, tends to think of marketing communications as
information
about
attributes of the 'tour product' such as price, quality, luxury, location etc., which are integrated
into tourism choices. In this psychological view of tourism (Mannell and Iso-Ahola 1987), the
nature of marketing communications is information. The process is a cognitive one, based on
stimulus and response. And the role of marketers herein is to channel the information to the
correct tourist segment as effectively and effi ciently as possible. The key purpose of marketing
communications is to connect to salient tourist motivations and enhance their
propensity to
choose
between products, brands or destinations across the tourism market (Smith 1994).
Though evidently practical for marketers, this view of communications obscures certain
assumptions about the nature of tourism as well as the role of tourists and marketers. How, for
example, do tourists come to know what a certain category of tourism means in the fi rst
instance? How are they able to establish one meaningful choice context from another? How do
they come to an understanding of the very different social practices that one type of tourism (e.g.
luxury cruise) involves when compared to others (e.g. backpacker)? Is the only outcome of com-
munications a marketing one - consumer choice - or are there wider social implications?
Attempting to answer some of these questions requires an alternative way of conceiving the
nature and role of marketing communications. Adopting a
discursive
perspective (Dann 1996;
Matthews 2009) on tourism, this chapter illuminates the socially constitutive nature of commu-
nications in tourism markets, the role of communications in shaping knowledge for tourists and
the role of marketers in mediating this process. The chapter will also give special consideration
to how a discursive perspective illuminates relations of power between tourists, markets and
other constituents represented in the 'tourism product' (Morgan and Pritchard 1998).
Tourism communications as a discourse
Central to the ideas discussed in this chapter is that discourse, as the purposive use of language
in constituting social reality (Berger and Luckmann 1966; Fairclough 1995), plays a key role in
organizing the ways in which tourism can be interpreted as a social practice. At its core,
