Peter Atorough

The politics of destination marketing: Assessing stakeholder interaction choice orientations toward a DMO formation, using the Thomas‐Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument

Purpose – Destination Management Organisations (DMOs) are very much a part of the Scottish tourism landscape in 2011. Some regional tourism stakeholders have created DMOs to manage their respective regional attractions, but until now, this has not been the case with north‐east Scotland. As a prelude to the potential creation of a regional DMO, the purpose of this paper is to empirically evaluate tourism business leaders attitudes and likely acceptance of the DMOs structure and functions.Design/methodology/approach – The Thomas‐Kilmann Conflict Mode (TKCM) was utilised to provide an evaluative framework, with discussion of the assertiveness versus cooperativeness needs of tourism business stakeholders in the region. The TKCMs measurement instrument was utilised along with a purpose‐built questionnaire to gather information about tourism leaders interaction orientations and their level of support for the formation of a DMO, its structure and functions.Findings – Tourism leaders in north‐east Scotland ar...

The relationship between regulatory focus and online shopping – perceived risk, affect, and consumers’ response to online marketing

Regulatory focus theory (RTF) has demonstrated that individuals can be distinguished on the basis of two independent structures of strategic inclination and orientation in the pursuit of goals: promotion focus – which emphasises the presence of positive outcomes while minimising errors of omission, versus prevention focus – which favours the absence of negative outcomes and minimising errors of commission. Yet no research, thus far, has explicitly considered the potential link between consumers’ regulatory focus (RF), perceived risk, affect, and their response to online marketing (ROM) in the various dimensions of online shopping (OS). This paper fills this gap. By linking regulatory focus with online consumer shopping behaviour we empirically test a number of hypotheses to predict how consumers with different foci perceive risk on the internet, the consequence of this perception on their affect, and their overall response behaviour to online marketing. Our findings provide confirmatory evidence that RF is a powerful predictor of behaviour in OS.