Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
behaviour and issues of climate change. Early inroads were made by tourism researchers seeking
to explore the concepts and techniques of social marketing in the context of sustainable tourism.
For example Dinan and Sargeant (2000) published one of the earliest papers which applied some
basic ideas of social marketing, including the social marketing mix, to a survey of 540 visitors to
three attractions in Devon (UK). This focussed on attempting to identify those market segments
that had visitors willing to follow a responsible code of conduct. They concluded that, 'social
marketing may have much to offer those responsible for the management of tourism products'
(Dinan and Sargeant 2000: 11). In effect one part of the study was suggestive of the possible
development of promotional marketing campaigns that focussed potentially on those individuals
who had 'expressed a willingness to change'. The intervention part of social marketing was
therefore limited.
Surprisingly this early study did not spark wider scale interest in social marketing, in part
because it did not engage with the underlying theories of behaviour change. At the same time
Bright (2000) argued for the use of the practices of social marketing to market the quality of life
benefi ts of tourism and recreation - seeing a strong link between social marketing and recreational
tourism. Hall (2013) has provided a discussion of the interests in social marketing by tourism
researchers using a range of examples. However, he also admits that 'direct tourism related
research on social marketing is still very limited' (Hall 2013: 5). He sees this in part as a matter of
labelling given the growing interest in sustainability research and climate change being undertaken
within tourism. Whilst much of this work may use the ideas of social marketing the authors do
not label their projects as such (Hall 2013).
Table 5.3
gives a short summary of selected social
marketing approaches within tourism and in part illustrates the issues associated with both
labelling as well as the actual use of social marketing processes.
We would add to Hall's view by returning to the 'sites of practice' discussion and argue the
diffi culties of spill-over sustainable behaviour between say home and holiday sites of practice.
Our research on the use of air travel for holiday use has shown that even committed environ-
mentalists within a domestic site of practice may very well not follow such pro-environmental
behaviours when it comes to holidays (Barr
et al
. 2011a, 2011b, 2011c). Under these circumstances
changing behaviour in terms of both social practices and sites of practice presents a more
challenging set of circumstances for social marketing. One of the accepted social practices for
holiday makers is the use of air travel and increasingly low cost carriers for short haul fl ights.
Cohen
et al
. (2011) have discussed the so-called addiction some consumers have with a
behavioural addiction to air travel. Such social practices are behavioural tendencies that contribute
to climate change and lead to unsustainable patterns of behaviour. The issue is whether a social
Table 5.3
Selected examples of social marketing and tourist behaviour
Authors
Context
Dinan and Sargeant (2000)
Social marketing applied to visitor attractions, review of marketing mix
Bright (2000)
General review but applications to healthy lifestyles and social welfare
Beeton (2001)
Ideas of de-marketing of gambling holidays
Beeton and Benfield (2012)
De-marketing to control demand in environmental sensitive areas
Wearing
et al
. (2007)
Developing target marketing messages for national parks
Kim
et al
. (2006)
Use of films promoting pro-environmental behaviour. Limited use of
social marketing methods
Source
: Authors and modified from Hall (2013)
