Introduction - Tourism Marketing - page 7

without their challenges, particularly the basic assumptions upon which segments are identifi ed,
either as natural (differences in market characteristics exist) or as exploratory (research process
identifi es and creates segments). Of course, each may have their use for the industry and Dolnicar
points to the potential that segmentation methods offer in the future for this key aspect of
tourism marketing research.
Much of the research on marketing evaluation has been undertaken from the perspective of
destination marketing campaigns. This is a key weakness of tourism marketing research as
highlighted elsewhere in this volume. Destination Marketing Organizations (DMOs) are often
at least part-funded by public money and so there is a need for good quality evaluation of the
success or otherwise of public investment in marketing activities. This is not the case with
the tourism industry, where there is little evidence of the relative effectiveness of different
marketing activities. Chapter 16 takes up the issues to discuss what works and what doesn't in
destination marketing campaigns. This is a complex issue as Pratt outlines, since it is diffi cult to
attribute destination visitation decisions to a particular stimulus and the complexity of the
destination system. Pratt negotiates these complexities and presents a clear review of evaluation
methods including combined and online evaluation techniques, and concludes that in the future
doing nothing just won't be an option.
The need for novel solutions to help counteract the challenges posed by an increasingly
digitally mediated world lead us on to the potential offered by combinations of positivistic
approaches to qualitative data. In Chapter 17 Woodside, Muniz and Sood relate how narratives
that tourists produce online during or after their travel experiences can be linked to psychological
archetypes, and thus inform place branding strategies and consumer behaviour. They outline
the use of degrees-of-freedom analysis (DFA) and visual narrative art (VNA) can be used to
reveal narrative archetypes. These archetypes can be matched against destination branding,
to feed into strategies and to understanding how consumers create value and attach meaning to
their tourist experiences.
The fi nal chapter in this part of the topic continues with methods relating to destination
image and branding, however from a qualitative perspective. Sangsue ( Chapter 18 ) addresses the
issue of brand confusion. Tourists, faced with an overwhelming mass of information from an
increasing range of media channels, have diffi culty in processing images and thus can become
confused. However, the focus of this chapter is on how Sangsue used photo-elicitation as a
stimulus to create confusion in her respondents. Visual methods have been used frequently in
tourism sociology and cultural studies, but less so in the context of tourism marketing. Sangsue
demonstrates the effectiveness of this approach to deal with marketing problems and outlines its
potential for tourism marketing and destination branding.
The tourist consumer
Part 5 moves to focus on the tourist as consumer. The section begins with a review of recent
theorizations of tourist behaviour by Decrop ( Chapter 19 ). Linking back to previous chapters
on the changing context of experience marketing and the tourist experience, Decrop argues
that the changing consumer context makes it even more critical that tourism marketing under-
stands the complex preference structures and decision patterns underpinning tourists' choice and
consumption processes. Theory in tourist consumer behaviour is both rich and infl uenced by
multi-disciplinary perspectives. Decrop outlines these underpinning paradigms, and shows how
they have informed theory on tourist decision making process. This links to the experience
concepts of Consumer Culture Theory (CCT) (Arnould and Price 1995) outlined in Chapter 9
by Batat and Frochot and the experience value concepts outlined by Prebensen in Chapter 3 and