Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
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 fi eld. It would be facile to try to map the development of the fi eld of
tourism marketing from its early beginnings to the current time. However, it is also diffi cult 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 fi eld 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 fi eld 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 fi eld 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 diffi cult 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 marketing's
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 scientifi c 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 fi elds. This was the
main underpinning aim for this topic.
At a very generic level, tourism marketing research can be best described as distorted in terms
of its coverage of marketing concepts and fi elds, 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.
