The Routledge Handbook of Tourism Experience Management and Marketing

Saurabh Kumar Dixit

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429515743
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

The Routledge Handbook of Tourism Experience Management and Marketing offers a comprehensive and thorough inquiry into both customary and emergent issues of tourism experience and co-creation. Drawing together contributions from 83 authors from 28 countries with varied backgrounds and interdisciplinary interests, the handbook highlights multiple representations and interpretations of the theme. It also integrates a selection of illustrative global case studies to effectively present its chapter contents.

Tourism experience drives the contemporary tourist's behavior as they travel in pursuit of experiencing unique and unusual destinations and activities. Creating a memorable and enduring experience is therefore a prerequisite for the all tourism business organizations irrespective of the nature of their products or services. This handbook focuses on conceptualizing, designing, staging, managing and marketing paradigms of tourism experiences from both supply and demand perspectives. It sheds substantial light on the contemporary theories, practices and future developments in the arena of experiential tourism management and marketing.

Encompassing the latest thinking and research themes, this will be an essential reference for upper-level students, researchers, academics and industry practitioners of hospitality as well as those of tourism, gastronomy, management, marketing, consumer behavior, cultural studies, development studies and international business, encouraging dialogue across disciplinary boundaries.

Part I

Tourism experience

Theories, structure and frameworks

1

Conceptualizations of tourism experience

Jon Sundbo and Saurabh Kumar Dixit

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Experience concept

stimuli

experience propositions

motive

Introduction

Experiences are posited at the center of tourism consumption; hence tourists travel in search of novel opportunities to attain memorable and enriching experiences. The scenario of modern society, the needs of consumers and the marketing practices of the organizations are changing dramatically. Sophisticated attitudinal, societal and technological changes have led to the creation of memorable experiences, giving an added benefit to the tourist and a competitive advantage to the business organizations. The tourism experience has been noted by both academics and policymakers as pivotal; however, the disparity in the central meaning of the concept is still evident (Jennings et al. 2009).

Therefore, this introductory chapter of the Handbook provides an overview of experience by highlighting the role of experience in tourism and discusses definitions of experience and different approaches to explain the growing interest in experiencing. The chapter deliberates different stages of tourism experience formation and the evolution of different experiential theories. The chapter also elaborates multidisciplinary perspectives of experience.

How experience is considered an important factor in tourism, in literature and practice will be discussed in the section to follow. This includes both what tourists experience as well as why and how tourism firms develop experiences as part of their product portfolio. Experience not only has an academic, conceptual interest, but it is also crucial for tourism firms’ and organizations’ business and daily work. This association between academic conceptualization and business practice will also be emphasized.

Experience: an overview

Experience is a complex psychological phenomenon, which can be conceptualized in varied manners. The current focus on experience may make it appear as though experience is a new phenomenon. This awareness has particularly been raised by Pine and Gilmore’s seminal work The Experience Economy from 1999. But experience is a phenomenon that probably is as old as mankind. Cave paintings dating back 14,000 years are proof that mankind, already many years ago, was occupied by experiencing and telling stories about experiences. Even the scientific registration of experience is not new. The American philosopher John Dewey (1929, 1934, 1938) had even in the 1920s and 30s written several books on experience’s role in peoples’ perception of art, education and nature. What is new, however, is a tremendous increase in experiences measured as human activities, which in economic terms is caused by increased wealth in societies and the satisfaction of material needs, leading people to seek fulfillment of mental and sensory needs. The forms of experience have also changed due to technological development; a great deal of experience is now derived from ICT media (TV, smartphones, the Internet, etc.) and cheap air transport increases long-distance tourism. Scientific attention toward and the conceptual discussion of experience has also developed substantially during the last two decades.

We may start the discussion and explication of the experience concept with a brief general definition:

An experience is something that happens in peoples’ minds, it is determined by external stimuli and elaborated via the mental awareness that people have from earlier motivational experiences, mental needs and personal strategies. Experience can be released by stimuli that affect all the senses.

(Sundbo and Sørensen 2013: 2)

Sometimes it is added that to be classified as an experience, an event should be extraordinary and memorable (Pine and Gilmore 1999, Mossberg 2008), but that criterion has been previously discussed (Sundbo and Sørensen 2013). It has also been debated whether experiences should be authentic (e.g. Gilmore and Pine 2007). It might be queried what authenticity is, but also events and stimuli that in no way could be classified as authentic can be called an experience, for example visiting a shopping mall or an “artificial” folk dance performed for tourists. Organizations stage an experience whenever they engage customers, connecting with them in a personal, memorable way. Staging experiences is not about entertaining customers; it is about engaging them (Pine and Gilmore 1999).

Multidisciplinary perspectives of experience

Although the above definition emphasizes the mental and maybe physiological elements, experience has also been illustrated from numerous different disciplinary perspectives. These different perspectives look into different dimensions of experiences among individuals and society, besides illuminating the reasons why comprehending experiences is important for people. The contemporary theoretical understanding of experience is generally conceived in three disciplinary approaches: economics, psychology and sociology. In the following paragraphs, these different perspectives will be presented and discussed.

Economic perspective on experience

Within an economic perspective Pine and Gilmore (1999) looked at experience as a general business phenomenon, which can be used in any business either as core products, add-ons to goods and services or in marketing. They talk about experience as “staging business as a theatre”. They argue that experience is a new field with great consumer interest, high added value and profit. Economic growth increasingly comes from experiences, which replace services as the fastest growing economic activity category, just as services in the late 1900s replaced goods. There are also analyses and theories that look at experience as a more delimited and focused economic sector. These analyses have defined a core experience sector which includes, for example: tourism, leisure and sport, entertainment, design, games and other ICT-based experiences (e.g. Nilsen and Dale 2013). Around that sector is often defined an “experience-related” sector containing, for example: the arts, architecture, TV and publishing. These are the traditional cultural or creative industries. Some analyses concern creative industries in which the “experience-related” sector, and sometimes the above defined experience industries, are included (e.g. Department for Culture, Media and Sport 2001, Power 2010). Statistically there is a confusion between “experience industries (or economy)”, “culture industries (or economy)” and “creative industries (or economy)” (see Andersson and Andersson 2006, Lorentzen 2013). Tourism may be placed in both “experience industries” and “creative industries”, but hardly in “culture industries” although there is an overlap between cultural activities and tourism. Thus, we may conclude that economics is increasingly paying attention to experience, but the exact definition of an economic experience sector is still under discussion.

Psychological perspective on experience

In the previous section we have defined experience as a mental phenomenon. In spite of that, psychology has only demonstrated a limited interest in explaining and defining experience. Csikszentmihalyi (2002) has presented his flow theory: flow is when people become very occupied by a certain achievement activity, such as becoming able to climb a mountain, write a novel or become a wine expert. The learning and progress in the achievement makes people forget time and place, and gives them a certain mental satisfaction – an inner peace and a sense of meaningfulness. Csikszentmihalyi calls this sensation flow experience. This is correct, but not all experience is flow (see also Privette 1983). For example, admiring the architecture of an old building that a tourist passes by may be an experience to be remembered but it cannot be classified as flow. The explanation of experience as a stimulus-based mental process has been discussed by Jantzen (2013). He presents a model of experiencing where external stimuli and the individual’s perception of these decides whether the individual gets an experience and which type of experience she or he will get. Jantzen suggests two dimensions for analyzing the experience: one is the hedonic tone (whether the stimuli are pleasant or unpleasant) and the other is arousal (how much awareness and energy the stimuli create). This leads to four types of experience: relaxation, boredom, excitement and anxiety. Jantzen’s theory is behavioristic and to some degree physiological, which might be discussed by other psychologists, but without doubt an experience is connected with the physiological senses (hearing, seeing, smelling, tasting, feeling with the fingers, tongue, etc.). However, any larger discussion has not yet emerged. It has been suggested that experiences need not only be positive and enjoyable. They can also be sad (such as participating in a funeral) and can include more serious activities, such as learning processes cf. Pine and Gilmore (1999), who operate with four types of experiences: aesthetic, escapism, entertainment and educational. One semantic point of consequence to note is that the term “experience” in English covers two meanings, which in other languages (for example German) are expressed by two different terms: one that characterizes joy (in German: erlebniss) and one that characterizes learning (in German: erfahrung). This must be taken into consideration when we define and discuss experience utilizing the English language.

Sociological perspective on experience

The sociological side of experience has not been emphasized that much. The German sociologist Gerhard Schulze wrote a large report (in German) in 1992 containing an empirical investigation of peoples’ cultural behavior and consumption in the city of Nürnberg. He divided the population into different strata depending on their cultural consumption behavior, based on age, education and general lifestyle. Schulze characterized this consumption as experience (“erlebniss”) and developed a theory of the experience society (“erlebniss gesellschaft”) based on the idea that experience consumption has become an important part of peoples’ lives. Sundbo and Sundbo (2018) have further developed the sociological explanation of people’s search for experiences. They explain the act of seeking out experiences as giving people an identity and being a social status marker. People around the world create certain interest fields, for example sport or gastronomy, and within them specific “paradigms” called Interest Regimes develop, for example interest in bicycling or molecular cuisine. An Interest Regime is a common framework for interaction and discourses.

The most developed sociologically based approach to experience is the marketing one, which concerns people’s consumer behavior. Experience marketing has become a large field within the marketing discipline (e.g. Schmitt 2003, Milligan and Smith 2008, Smilanski 2009, Dixit 2017). This field is a continuation of the view that consumption is also emotional or hedonic (Holbrook and Hirschman 1982, Carù and Cova 2003). The idea is that people seek out emotional experiences so much that it is an advantage for firms to connect sales of goods and services with experience. The success of the experience concept within marketing is partly caused by Customer Relationship Marketing having become a dominant approach. The approach stems from service theory, which has emphasized service suppliers’ close interaction with customers in the moment of production and consumption of a service (Lovelock and Wirtz 2011). The customers’ assessment of the provided service and the provision process is seen as crucial for their repeat purchases and willingness to pay a high price for the service. Customers’ assessment is called customer experience. This t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I: Tourism experience: theories, structure and frameworks
• PART II: Crafting tourism experiences
• PART III: Marketing tourism experiences
• PART IV: Technology enabled tourism experiences
• PART V: Sustainable tourism experience
• PART VI: Emerging avenues of tourism experience and co-creation
• Index