Journal of Tourism and Development

Journal of Tourism and Development

Analyzing The Past And Mapping The Future Of Experiential Marketing In Tourism: A Scientometric Approach

Document Type : Original Article

Authors
1 PhD student, International Kish Branch, Islamic Azad University, Kish Island, Iran.
2 Associate professor, Business Management Department, Shiraz university, Shiraz, Iran
3 Assisstant professor, Industrial Management Department, Islamic Azad University of Centeral Tehran Branch, Tehran, Iran
4 Associate professor, Public Management Department, Islamic Azad University of West Tehran Branch, Tehran, Iran
10.22034/jtd.2023.363922.2670
Abstract
Consumer experience is one of the most important influencing factors in the formation of people's attitudes about goods and services. Today, traditional marketing methods no longer respond to the changing characteristics, needs and demands of consumers. Therefore, managers and marketers are looking for new and effective methods to attract and maintain demand in today's competitive and complex markets, and experiential marketing is one of these methods. One of the important fields in marketing, which can play a special role in the development of tourism, is experiential marketing. The purpose of this research is to identify the development and progress made in the field of experiential marketing in tourism.
 From the point of view of the research method, this research is a longitudinal, descriptive and library-type research. The method of collecting information was in the form of documents. The method of data analysis in this research is scientometrics and social network analysis. Social networks are a network of people, groups and connections between them. Individuals and member groups form the nodes, and the dependencies between these individuals such as friendship, kinship, business, common interests, etc., form the edges between the nodes. In social networks based on scientometrics, the nodes represent the author, magazine, country, keywords, etc., and the links show the citation or correlation between the nodes. In order to achieve this, the articles available in the O Science website were retrieved in a 28-year period (1994 to 2022) and were analyzed using scientometric methods and using Sitespace software. This software is based on Java and is a program that is used to analyze and depict trends and patterns in scientific articles. This software program is capable of understanding and interpreting historical patterns and trends, identifying new topics that have grown rapidly in scientific sources, finding reference points and network analysis.
The overall results show that since 2014, empirical marketing research in tourism has attracted increasing attention from researchers, as the number of articles published per year has increased significantly. The field of experiential marketing in tourism has now evolved from the conceptualization stage to the implementation stage. Although research on experiential marketing in tourism has grown significantly, it has not yet reached its full maturity, as both theoretical and practical issues and methodological issues need further investigation. Most importantly, the literature regarding the identification of different constructs for measuring experience in the tourism industry is limited. Researchers sometimes use constructs that are suitable for measuring customer satisfaction and service quality to measure the tourist experience. But this survey showed that there is a fundamental difference between the factors measuring service and experience. In order to identify and develop an experience, it is necessary to know how the tourist experience can be measured to capture all aspects of the experience in the tourism industry. A lack of conceptual interaction across studies in our review was also observed. Our analysis identified few articles that linked the tourism experience with theories from disciplines such as psychology, environmental aspects, sociology, branding, etc. Of course, there are exceptions. Research has used several theories to explain the tourism experience. Management research has called for the combination of several theoretical lenses to explain the phenomenon of experience in tourism. In the field of tourism experiences, this gap can be addressed, for example, by integrating existing frameworks to better understand the prerequisites, dimensions and outputs of experiences in tourism. Another aspect of the experience in the tourism industry that needs attention, and has become a hot keyword in recent years, is the interaction of the social environment in the development and presentation of the experience. For example, how the group experience affects the tourist's decision has not been considered. While there is some literature on the interaction between the service provider and the consumer, interactions between tourists are rarely examined in the existing literature. Considering the rapid increase in tourist interaction through social networks, the most contemporary research area can be how companies look at creating and maintaining customer relationships between them. Another important issue that is observed in the research, but little literature was found in this area, is the impact of technology-based systems on the tourist experience. Technologies such as augmented reality have formed a cluster in research, but research in the field of technology is thin. Given that the technology-based environment will become very popular in the tourism sector of emerging as well as developed countries, insight into how and to what extent technology-based systems affect the overall tourist experience is crucial, for example, how the choice of tourist destination based on online information can be investigated as it affects the experience of tourists.
 These results will help researchers to understand the boundaries of the research conducted in the application of experiential marketing in tourism and obtain valuable scientific information through which they can determine the development process of their future research.
Keywords

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