Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
importance of 'experience' much before this publication as represented by the work of Jakle
(1985), Gunn (1988, 1994) and Urry (1990), among others. Indeed, Arnould and Price (1993) in
their article 'River Magic: Extraordinary service and the extended service encounter' clearly
documented the role of experience within what they later characterized as the 'servicescape'.
However, the emergence of the Internet enabled destination marketing organizations to now
realize the catchphrase 'markets of one'. In large part this was accomplished by a systematic
restructuring of DMOs whereby they changed from focusing on external marketing to
building capacity within the organization and the destination necessary to support visitors in
very different ways. Importantly, these changes mirrored the emerging conversation within the
marketing literature that examined the nature of places, the nature of the tourism experience,
the role of the visitor within the experience, the role of various forms of communications
and, more recently, the role of social settings (both immediate and further away) in creating the
visitor experience.
Parallel to this evolution in destination marketing, our understanding of services emerged
within the general marketing literature under the rubric 'services dominant logic', whereby
Vargo and Lusch (2004, 2008) compellingly argued that services are essentially different than
goods and therefore the economic models of exchange and marketing should differ. This
meant that service businesses including tourism marketing organizations can (and should) use a
variety of business models in order to create value, communicate with and ultimately realize
revenue from the visitor. Further, this new paradigm has led to a new area called 'service design'
or within tourism, 'experience design', which now unifi es the basic concepts proposed by Gunn
(1988) in Vacationscape, the concepts of servicescape and the basic principles of event design.
Examples of the emergence of S-D logic within tourism and hospitality setting include the
initial success of themed restaurants such as the Rain Forest Café and the Hard Rock Café,
the growth of highly niche marketed hotels and resorts, the dominance of systems such as
TripAdvisor whereby the experiences of the travellers provide the core product, and, fi nally,
epitomized by the success of Disney in that they have designed 'mass market products' which are
now highly individualized. As such, these products support and therefore derive value from their
customers across the entire range of tourism experiences.
Based upon the success of these organizations, tourism marketing has also shifted in focus
from a traditional 'marketing' and 'advertising' approach characterized by simple promotion of
the destination to a variety of forms such as permission marketing and customer relationship
management (CRM). This shift toward 'markets of one' has been exemplifi ed by the sophistica-
tion in the second and third generation design of destination websites, the use of search engine
optimization strategies and destination recommendation systems, and the realization that
success is led by the innovativeness of organizations' partnerships and their efforts in 'long tail'
marketing (Anderson 2008). Importantly, the foundations created by investing heavily in
adapting to the new 'experience marketing' paradigm have enabled destination marketing
organizations to respond to the challenges of social media. That is, they have 'emerged' from the
last two decades better able to exploit a range of business models which ultimately create value
for the destination.
Efforts in market control by destinations through branding
Over the past two decades 'destination branding' has become the logic
de jour
as destination
marketing organizations tried to model the success of consumer products such as Nike and
Coca Cola, hotels such as Hilton, Marriott, Holiday Inn and the Ritz-Carleton, and cities
such as Las Vegas, New York and Paris. Initiated early in the 1990s when Aaker (1991) wrote
