Research in tourism marketingan analysis of topics and methodologies

Resumen

Tourism has been one of the very last sectors to assume a marketing approach focused on the consumer, and therefore marketing researchers have been concerned about the identification of key trends in tourism marketing only since the last decade (Bigné, 1996, 2004; Bigné, Andreu & Sánchez, 2005; Mattila, 2004; Oh, Kim & Shin, 2004) in line with the recent development of tourism as a scientific discipline (see Jafari, 2005). The continuation and updating of past efforts is required since marketing’s scope is still evolving (Day & Montgomery, 1999; Kerin, 1996; Oh et al., 2004), as clearly illustrated by the most recent definition of the term “marketing” adopted by the American Marketing Association (AMA, 2005; Keefe, 2004) and its already discussed limitations (Grönroos, 2006; Palmer, Lindgreen & Vanhamme, 2005). Some papers have identified various tourism marketing trends in the recent past (Bowen & Sparks, 1998; Mattila, 2004; Oh et al., 2004). Although these are very valuable contributions to the tourism marketing literature, a long range perspective of the evolution of the field cannot be determined since it is not possible to establish a complete temporal link to trace it. Xiao and Smith (2006a, b) provide such a temporal perspective but they do not focus specifically on marketing but on tourism and hospitality in general. Therefore, the present research is focused on identifying research trends in tourism marketing through content analysis of the papers published in the two top journals on tourism, Annals of Tourism Research (ATR) and Tourism Management (TM), during the period 1995-2006, intending to be an extended update on Bigné (2004) and Bigné et al. (2005), and establishing a complementary and comparative frame to those.