Introduction - Tourism Marketing - page 4

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
marketing's effects on society and or social processes.
The last section, Part 9 , also contains two chapters under the umbrella of 'refl ections'. In the
fi rst 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 fi nal 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
fi rst part of the topic, such as prosumption, and the imperative to co-create tourism experiences
to maximize consumer value. They emphasize the shifting power dynamics between consumers
and fi rms 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 topic 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 infl uence or otherwise
relate to the main scientifi c 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 fi nite 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 fi ckle
consumer demand perhaps dictates an orientation to short-termism and profi t today mentality.
Conterminously, the actions of the tourism industry are inseparably bound to wider socio-
political forces of power. Hence there is a need to try to understand how and what tourism
marketing contributes to the wider debates about marketing's 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 fi rms become
involved in responsible tourism and contextualize their discussion in the dominant social
paradigm of the 'West', 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 fi xated 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 fi rst place and
in encouraging behaviour that might best be characterized as self-indulgent. Social marketing