What is tourism marketing?

Most people have an idea that tourism has something to do with travel and that marketing has something to do with advertising. But what exactly is tourism marketing? In this video and article we seek to find an answer.

In an earlier post, we offered the following simple definition of tourism: Tourism is what people do when they visit a place outside their usual environment. Tourism is an activity that is undertaken by people that travel away from home for a limited time, and this activity is facilitated by tourism organizations and businesses that use marketing as a competitive tool to draw travelers to their destinations and their companies.

As suggested in the introduction, advertising is indeed a part of marketing, but marketing is about a whole lot more than just advertising. Advertising is commonly thought of as one of several tools in what we call the marketing communications mix, but marketing communications is just one of many tools within the overall marketing mix. Marketing communications is therefore more than just advertising, and marketing is more than just marketing communications.

Marketing is about everything from developing products, setting appropriate prices, promoting your products to potential customers, and then finding the best places to distribute or deliver your products to those customers. But advertising is probably the marketing tool that most people are most familiar with because we see so much advertising all around us every day. And precisely because advertising is a relatively small but highly visible part of marketing, we often imagine advertising as the tip of the marketing iceberg, while the rest of the tools that marketers use is more hidden beneath the surface.

The Marketing Pie

It is common to say that marketing is about trying to satisfy people's needs and wants. And when it comes to tourism; this often involves satisfying tourists' need for travel and travel experiences. But to do the marketing job effectively, it is important to take a systematic approach to what you are doing. And one way to systematize all the activities involved in marketing, is by way of what we at What is tourism call The Marketing Pie.

The Marketing Pie

This model describes a process in three steps, and it starts with planning. Planning includes everything from market research to finding out what needs the tourists have, analysis of the environment and your competitors, setting goals and strategies, and writing a marketing plan.

Then, after the planning, comes implementation. This is when you implement or execute all the activities that you have decided on during the planning process. It is in this phase that the tourism services are performed and delivered.

Then comes evaluating, which is about measuring and checking the results of what you have done and comparing them to the goals you have set in the planning stage. Then you can continue with the activities that have worked and drop or adjust the activities that have not worked.

It is important to remember, however, that you are never really done with your marketing efforts, because after the evaluation, you will be using the knowledge you have gained to adjust your goals and strategies into the next planning period. So, this is a cycle that just continues.

A definition of tourism marketing

So now that we know that marketing is all about satisfying wants and needs, and know the three basic tasks from The Marketing Pie, we can put this together into a simple, yet precise definition of marketing:

“Marketing is a systematic process that involves planning, implementing and evaluating activities aimed at satisfying the needs and wants of customers.”

And since this is tourism marketing we are talking about here, we can define this as:

“Tourism marketing is a systematic process that involves planning, implementing and evaluating activities aimed at satisfying the needs and wants of tourists.”

A definition of tourism marketing

As a tourism marketer one should be aware that the products or services that one sells in the tourism industry have certain characteristics that makes tourism marketing different from the marketing of other products. But all that is a topic we will return to in a later blog post.