Maria Lichrou

Place-product or place narrative(s)? Perspectives in the Marketing of Tourism Destinations

This paper utilises a narrative approach to appraise critically the challenges and paradoxes faced by tourism destination marketing, and the inherent weaknesses of the traditional marketing management framework to adequately address them. In so doing, the treatment of place as a set of attributes is contrasted with its conceptualisation as a set of meanings. In perceiving place as a set of meanings, the focus of attention shifts to a number of different issues, such as the role of culture and symbolic meanings in the construction and experience of place and the contested ‘realities’ involved in the making of a tourism destination.

On the marketing implications of place narratives

Abstract Acknowledging that ‘locals’ are recognised as an important (yet neglected) dimension of place marketing and following critiques of places as ‘products’, the purpose of this paper is to give voice to ‘local people’. Drawing on local narratives of Santorini, Greece, we call attention to places as culturally significant and discursively produced and consumed. Local narratives provide multiple meanings constructed around the diverse and contested experiences of living and making a living in a place. Our analysis employs the metaphors of ‘harsh beauty’, ‘service business’ and ‘home’ to capture these perspectives. The paper has implications for the development of generative metaphors of ‘place’ and ‘local’ within place marketing and contributes to the dialogue over the continued relevance of our discipline to the public sphere.

Mining and tourism: Conflicts in the marketing of Milos Island as a tourism destination

Abstract Milos Island, Greece, has been a mining place since antiquity and at the same time is located in an area, the Cyclades Islands, which for decades has been associated with tourism. Various stakeholders are making efforts to develop the tourism sector on the island and are involved in initiatives for its promotion. The present paper reveals dimensions of the contested interests inherent in this process, as different stakeholder groups are interpreting differently the ‘realities’ of the place, and the main antagonisms emerging from the relationship between the mining and the tourism sectors. The fieldwork revealed unresolved tensions between various communities and in reporting these we rely heavily on a narrative.

Unveiling everyday reflexivity tactics in a sustainable community

Approaches to enhancing sustainability have largely focused on altering individual consumption behaviors. However, this focus on the individual consumer has been recently critiqued because the behavior of individuals is situated within wider socio-cultural contexts. Thus, the sustainability research agenda is shifting away from individual consumers towards understanding consumption practices, social networks, material infrastructures and organisations of various forms in which consumption is problematized and consumption choices are reflected upon and negotiated. These social spaces need to be understood if change is to be truly achieved. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in an Irish ecovillage, we examine how ecovillage members negotiate sustainable consumption at the everyday level. Analysis reveals how members of the ecovillage employ tactics that encourage reflexivity in the everyday. Specifically, these reflexive tactics work together to confront routine consumption, create alternative infrastructures that support sustainability, and foster critical engagement.

Making Santorini: reflecting on the past, imagining the future

Purpose Strategic analyses of Mediterranean destinations have well documented the impacts of mass tourism, including high levels of seasonality and landscape degradation as a result of the “anarchic” nature of tourism development in these destinations. The lack of a strategic framework is widely recognised in academic and popular discourse. What is often missing, however, is local voice and attention to the local particularities that have shaped the course of tourism development in these places. Focusing on narratives of people living and working in Santorini, Greece, this paper aims to examine tourism development as a particular cultural experience of development. Design/methodology/approach The authors conducted narrative interviews with 22 local residents and entrepreneurs. Participants belonged to different occupational sectors and age groups. These are supplemented with secondary data, consisting of books, guides, documentaries and online news articles on Santorini. Findings The analysis and interpretation by the authors identify remembered, experienced and imagined phases of tourism development, which we label as romancing tourism, disenchantment and reimagining tourism. Research limitations/implications Professionalisation has certainly allowed the improvement of quality standards, but in transforming hosts into service providers, a distance and objectivity is created that results in a loss of authenticity. Authenticity is not just about what the tourists seek but also about what a place is or can be, and the “sense of place” that residents have and use in their everyday lives. Social implications Local narratives offer insights into the particularities of tourism development and the varied, contested and dynamic meanings of places. Place narratives can therefore be a useful tool in developing a reflexive and participative place-making process. Originality/value The study serves the understanding of how tourism, subject to the global-local relations, is a particular experience of development that shapes a place’s identity. The case of Santorini shows how place-making involves changing, multilayered desires and contradictory visions of tourism and development. This makes socio-cultural and environmental challenges hard to resolve. It is thus challenging to change the course of development, as various actors at the local level and beyond have diverse interests and interpretations of what is desirable for the place.

Pilgrimage, Consumption and the Politics of Authenticity: An Abstract

Pilgrimages are a feature of all major world religions as well as spiritual movements and more secular realms (Digance 2003; Margry 2008). The sacred sites of pilgrimages are often important commercial centres featuring vibrant marketplaces, where spiritual goods and services are sold (Scott and Maclaran 2012). As such, pilgrimages and pilgrims’ consumption behaviours can provide rich sites of inquiry into symbolic, spiritual and material consumption. Muslim pilgrimages are notoriously closed to outsiders, and there has traditionally been little opportunity for research studies to gain access and insights. This ethnographic research contributes to further understanding consumption practices at the intersection of the sacred and the secular.

Place branding and place narratives

This chapter discusses the potential of narratives in facilitating community engagement through a participative place branding process. Narrative is an important mode through which people construct reality and as such narrative is also implicated in the formation of place. As means through which we can make sense of people’s experiences of place and their desires and aspirations, narratives are also relevant to the aims of bottom-up, participative place branding programmes. These approaches are gaining popularity, following criticisms of top-down place branding for failing to resonate with place realities and the disenchantment of different communities with place brands. Finally, addressing methodological considerations of the narrative inquiry approach, the chapter examines ways to access, elicit and make sense of place narratives. The narrative perspective advocated here puts emphasis on branding as a reflexive, dynamic and collaborative process that embraces and works with the inherent tensions and contradictions of places.

An Investigation of Young Consumers Alcohol Consumption: an Irish Perspective

This study focuses on alcohol consumption in Ireland. The aim of this research is to investigate how young Irish consumers use alcohol in their endeavour to construct a coherent social identity within a culture of excessive alcohol consumption. The research also investigates the socialisation process that works to encourage this apparent excessive consumption. Essentially, the research focuses on exploring the ways in which social values and attitudes with respect to alcohol consumption are fashioned, sustained and expressed through the process of socialisation. In addition, the research focuses on gaining a greater understanding of how individuals resolve the tension that exists between the desire to achieve social inclusion through conforming to group norms that promote consumption versus the desire to retain an element of agency or control over one”s own consumption behaviour. The research also aims to identify a number of public policy recommendations that can contribute in a meaningful way to future social policy formation.

Academy of Marketing conference 2015 – the magic of marketing

In marketing, as on Yeats’ leafy island, magic abounds. The magic of marketing has been attended to directly in terms of a proposed magical worldview (Brown, 2009) to all manner of other remarkable phenomena. From the fantastical storytelling of advertising that routinely plunders our repository of folk tales (Dégh & Vazsonyi, 1979), to the extraordinary experiences of consumers seeking an escape from their mundane lives (Arnould & Price, 1993). From the contagious incantations of marketing musicscapes (Roberts, 2014), to that special ‘soft’ quality of the brand that is brand identity (Biel, 1997). Indeed, truly inspirational marketing brings brands to life through the magic of imagination and mythmaking. The Academy of Marketing Conference 2015: The Magic in Marketing, hosted by the University of Limerick, sought to explore those dimensions of our craft that are magical; from the cabbalistic to the fantastical, and from the astonishing to the preternatural. We encouraged contributions that addressed the mystical, marvellous and miraculous in marketing theory and practice. The final papers selected for this special issue represent an integration of these core themes across a range of different contexts. AM2015 received over 480 submissions across 12 different tracks. Reflecting the increasing international nature of this conference, papers were received from authors located in more than 40 different countries. Our thanks go to all the reviewers and track chairs without whose help the conference would not have been the success that it was. With so many papers submitted, competition for inclusion in this special issue was high. A total of 27 papers were long listed, and after a rigorous review process, we are pleased to present the final 11 papers for this special conference issue of the Journal of Marketing Management. In the first paper, Heath and Heath adopt a critical marketing perspective to assess the roles of fantastical themes in the stories of marketing practitioners, scholars and consumers. They argue that the promotion of the ideology of consumption that characterises contemporary society relies heavily on the use of stories of enchantment. For their part scholars also use magical themes in their critiques or defences of the practice of marketing. Even consumers mobilise fantasy and myth in pursuing consumptionoriented identity projects and in making sense of and managing their everyday consumption experiences. JOURNAL OF MARKETING MANAGEMENT, 2016 VOL. 32, NOS. 9–10, 807–810 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0267257X.2016.1193974