2. Literature Review
2.2 Tourism Destination Marketing
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2.2 Tourism Destination Marketing
The past studies on tourism destination marketing mainly focused on three dimensions—destination image, consumer behaviors of tourists, and tourism marketing strategy.
Due to the importance of destination image on tourists’ perceptions and behaviors, it has been a widely research subject in the past literatures. Some researchers defined destination images and developed different typologies (Gunn, 1972; Echtner and Ritchie, 1991), others have studied how destination images influence consumer behaviors (e.g., Echtner and Ritchie, 1991; Hanlan and Kelly, 2005); and still some on the image selection and management for destination (Day et al., 2001).
Consumer behavior studies in tourism mainly focus on how people search for the destination information and how their destination choices are influenced. Several researches have examined tourism consumer behavior in detail (e.g., Buhalis, 2000;
Cai, Feng, Breiter, 2004; DiPietro et al., 2007). Specifically in Taiwan, Chen, Jung, and Chen (2004) have studied the purchasing behaviors and revisit intention of tourists from China. Chan (2006) has analyzed the travel experiences of Japanese tourists in Taiwan.
Since tourism marketing is a more challenging form of marketing, many researchers have dedicated to the studies on tourism marketing strategy. Several destination brands have been studied by way of case study, including New Zealand (Morgan et al., 2002, 2005), Wales (Morgan and Pritchard, 2005), United Kingdom (Wang, 2005), and Scotland (Page, Steele, and Connell, 2006). In Taiwan, most of the researches on tourism marketing strategy focus on festivals (e.g. Yang, 2005) and place marketing like Kaushiung city (Chen, 2005) or Kenting town (Wu, Chu, and Tsai, 2004) instead of viewing Taiwan as a whole tourism brand. Yu (2007), however,
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has done a case study on Taiwan destination brand from the IMC’s perspective, but with more focus on organization than on messages across countries.
The review of literatures on tourism marketing reveals that only a few has focused on country as a tourism destination brand and even fewer discussed the coordination of tourism promotions across different countries. Besides, the analysis of the promotion materials from the destination marketer’s point of view is scarce
compared to that from the tourist’s side. Therefore, more research on how destination marketers promote their tourism brands on a global scale is needed.
Just like what is mentioned above, some researchers have analyzed the global promotions of destination brands like New Zealand, Wales, Scotland, and the United Kingdom and these case studies could serve as the foundation for the current research For example, Morgan et al. (2002) studied the first ever global branding initiative of New Zealand—100 % Pure New Zealand, which was launched from July 1999 to February 2000. They found out the theme of “100% and purity” is echoed in all the visuals and the copy of the promotional materials from global advertising, public relation events, direct marketing, and even websites. They further pointed out that the award-winning website (www.purenz.com), which conveyed a sense of experiencing the country rather than merely a site encounter, played an important role in the campaign by complementing other advertising, public relations activities and other media.
A more recent example of tourism marketing is on how adventure tourism has been promoted in Scotland and the way it has been represented in photographic images (Page et al., 2006). In this study, the brochures for Scotland produced in 2004 as well as the materials screen-grabbed from the tourism websites are examined.
Using the methodology devised by Schellhorn and Perkins (2004) and Dyer (1982), this study content analyzed image’s component parts, which can be further divided
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into four elements: products, props, settings, and actors. The result revealed that the imagery was not coherent throughout all areas of Scotland and clearly lack of consistency in the design of each area’s brochure, layout, messages, and images, which resulted from an unclear strategy.
From the above two examples, the role of strategy seems to outstand that of execution. It shows that New Zealand successfully coordinated its global promotions across different countries and thus conveyed a consistent themes (100% and pure) through advertising, public relations, or website, although the detailed executions differed. On the other hand, from the case of Scotland, the inconsistency in imagery and messages of the promotional brochures caused by lack of cooperation between public sectors and private sectors also reinforces the need for a clear adventure tourism strategy. Therefore, it can be inferred that the key success factor of a global tourism promotion lies in its coordination of strategy more than of execution. As long as the execution revolves around the core idea of the campaign, synergies can be achieved and strong, consistent massages can be created. Indeed, this concept seems to correspond to what Therkelsen (2003) found a “glocal approach” employed by Danish Tourist Board when examining its national branding strategy in 2000. He argued that certain meaning and images can be shared across cultures while some only understood by a certain group of people. Therefore, a glocal approach can help destination marketers gain the advantage of economies of scale by standardizing some universal images as a global platform which conveys a consistent, recognizable identity for the destination, but meanwhile allow room for local adaptation for different markets. Again, what matters for an effective global promotion of a destination is strategy rather than execution.
In sum, the review of these former studies reveals that only a few treat countries as destination brands on a global scale, among which some focus only on one of the
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marketing communication tools (most of them on global advertising) or on the demand side rather than from the destination marketers’ point of view. Besides, none of them uses IMC as the theoretical foundation to examine tourism destination marketing. Given the above reasons, it is adequate to combine IMC with tourism destination marketing to fill the academic gap in both fields. Furthermore, to better examine the global communications of Taiwan tourism brand, the current research decide to use GIMC proposed by Grein and Gould (1996) as the theoretical
framework. In the following section, GIMC will be further illustrated.