Consumers' perceptions of language used for destination marketing

What is it about?

Language quality of marketing material may affect consumers' perceptions of a destination. In this study, travel consumers gave their reactions to two sets of marketing text: one produced by tourism communication students, and one produced by the marketing organization for the destination. Results indicate that learning certain writing techniques can help students produce effective marketing materials.

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Why is it important?

A lot of effort is put into finding out what makes consumers respond positively to destination marketing, yet research has generally not looked at this simple variable of language quality. An increasing number of both small and large destinations around the world are marketing to various foreign language targets. Whether their marketing is effective or not may depend in large part on whether they rely simply on crude translation, or whether they put effort into creating original, well-written materials in the target language. Tourism education has an important role to play in helping students move into the field with sufficient foreign language promotional competence.