Experiential Consumption and Marketing in Tourism within a Cross-Cultural Context

Culture is the entangling web of symbols, sounds, rituals, rites and practices by which we become persons and by which we can grow. Culture is often the reason for travel, and both bargain and barrier in its consumption. Underpinned by globalization, tourism is both enabling and threatening culture and its practices, as business commodifies authentic differences. This book includes contributions that analyze and critique initiations to culture, and reports on the facilitation, celebration and sharing of culture through tourism and how each is manifested in tourism marketing theory, policy and practice. It contains case examples of the opportunities, best practices, aims, pitfalls and mistakes of those tourism businesses which have culture as their core experience as well as cases of where different tourists are engaged in exploring and learning about other cultures. In addition, the book contains chapters on the below themes of interest where culture has contributed strongly to their outcomes: the roles of tourists, locals and communities, events, business practices in facilitating and sharing culture, relationship marketing, experiential marketing, cross-border marketing, product differentiation and market segmentation, shopping experiences, storytelling and visual narrative analysis. Part of the Advances in Tourism Marketing series - a series of cutting-edge research-informed edited books that introduce the reader to a range of contemporary marketing phenomena in the domain of travel and tourism.