Introduction - Tourism Marketing - page 11

consumer behaviour and processes. Hudson outlines these changes, particularly relating them to
social media and how these can be leveraged in tourism marketing communications. There are
some really pertinent practical examples of strategies being used by tourism organizations and
destinations, which provides a useful context to discuss future potentials, particularly in terms
of smartphones.
Social media applications and marketing potentials are the subject of closer scrutiny in
Chapter 36 . Social media can provide an effective platform to develop viral marketing campaigns,
and this has proven a very attractive proposition for tourism marketers. Gretzel and Yoo outline
the main principals of social media marketing strategies, arguing that some of the main premises
of social media belie a lack of understanding of the costs and/or potential pitfalls in terms of
customer reaction or engagement. Therefore careful design and management of social media
strategies is essential as well as an understanding of the ways customers engage with social
media. Gretzek and Yoo argue that because this fi eld is evolving so rapidly, there is an urgent
need for more research on how customers react to social media marketing and what they value
from the relationships with tourism fi rms or destinations.
The most important source of online advertising revenue is in search engine marketing
(SEM) and so it is fi tting that Chapter 37 presents a detailed analysis of the dynamic relationships
between the tourism fi rm, the user and the search engine, which have not been well documented
and which need to be understood in order to address the potentials that search marketing plays
in tourism marketing strategies. Zheng Xiang, Pan and Fesenmaier begin by reviewing the
literature on search engine marketing in order to develop a framework to explain how tourists
use search engines in travel planning. Pre-search considerations and search processes form frames
through which post-search evaluation of information is cognitively organized. From this model,
the authors develop six key lessons to guide effective strategies in search engine marketing
in tourism.
Chapter 38 examines the role of travel blogs as communication vehicles and their applications
for tourism marketing. Bosangit argues that there has been an expansion in research on the
application of blogs in marketing and yet there have been limited analyses of their use in tourism
contexts. She outlines how travel blogs serve as a great source of naturalistic data, upon which
she performs powerful discourse analysis to demonstrate what travel blogs reveal about tourist
experiences. Bosangit outlines the implications for tourism marketers. McCabe, Foster, Chunxiao
Li and Nanda ( Chapter 39 ) provide evidence form a study comparing UK smartphone users
with non-users to provide empirical evidence on how travel experiences are becoming
increasingly mediated by smartphone applications. This is a fi tting end to the substantive chapters
as the mobile marketing research agenda signals a new dimension to tourism marketing research
and one that will take the subject into new, unchartered territories.
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