Introduction - Tourism Marketing - page 6

psychological environment of tourists in terms of what they seek from the experience of travel.
The fi rst chapter in this section moves us some way towards an understanding of what an
experiential approach to tourism marketing might entail. Batat and Frochot develop a new
framework for an experiential perspective to tourism marketing ( Chapter 9 ). Whilst Neuhofer
and Buhalis ( Chapter 10 ) connect ideas about experience co-creation and experience marketing
to technology enhanced tourism experiences, 'Experience 3.0'. Recognizing the importance of
brands as mediators of all our lives, Foley, Fahy and Ivers outline the concept of brand experience
and relate this to tourism marketing contexts ( Chapter 11 ). The fi nal two chapters in this section
deal with some perennial strategic issues, collaboration and customer satisfaction.
Fyall ( Chapter 12 ) outlines how the new marketing realities outlined in earlier chapters
are pushing fi rms towards greater levels of collaboration. He provides the example of collaboration
in the airline sector as one of the most successful and yet most complex forms of collabora-
tion, which provides a useful illustration of issues and lessons for the broader sector. Whilst
Foster ( Chapter 13 ) debates the approaches taken to understanding satisfaction in tourism. She
explains that if the tourism industry really wants to understand what makes customers satisfi ed,
it needs to reconfi gure the ways we conceptualize customer satisfaction studies. She argues that
tourists evaluate their travel experiences in a socially constructed and co-created way through
interactions with industry representatives, locals (hosts) and other tourists. The performative
approach advocated by Foster chimes with the appeal made by Prebensen in Chapter 2 for a
more considered engagement between the industry and tourists to understand the process of
value co-creation.
New approaches and critical developments in the conceptualization of tourism from a
marketing perspective require an examination of marketing research methodologies and research
issues. Part 4 addresses recent advances and developments in research. The majority of marketing
research comes from the quantitative perspective, and in tourism as with the main marketing
fi eld, there is a plethora of analytic techniques, challenges posed by tourism marketing research
problems and new metrics being developed constantly.
Tourism marketing research
The issue of marketing metrics in the digital era is particularly relevant given the potential
opportunities provided by 'big data' and the need to understand how to evaluate social media
marketing activity. The section opens with a review of quantitative methods in tourism market-
ing research ( Chapter 14 ). Mazanec, Ring, Stangl and Teichmann begin by reviewing the main
techniques used in tourism marketing research. They argue that in general there is a lag in
methods being adopted in tourism research from the main marketing fi eld. Examples such as
Principal Component Analysis and social and semantic network analysis are provided. The
authors deal with foundational issues such as critical factors underpinning knowledge drawn
from scales; a range of issues relating to assumptions underpinning Structural Equation Modelling;
segmentation and clustering techniques and discrete choice modelling. The chapter synthesizes
the main methodological issues facing quantitative marketing analysts in tourism and provides
new avenues for future research that promise to overcome current challenges.
Identifying that segmentation research has formed a very important strand of tourism
marketing research, Sara Dolnicar provides a focused discussion on the methods and issue in
Chapter 15 . Dolnicar fi rst outlines the role of market segmentation in marketing planning before
discussing the disconnect between academic research on market segmentation and the practices
of the tourism industry. Industry often uses naïve or basic approaches to segment their markets,
yet there are sophisticated approaches being used in academic research. However, these are not