INET'97
Commerce: The New Frontiers
Internet-marketing and the Norwegian tourism industry
A national coordinated marketing effort on the Internet
Ingvar Tjostheim (Ingvar.Tjostheim@nr.no)
Kari Aanonsen
NR, Norwegian Computing Center
Gaustadalleen 23, P.O Box 114, Blindern,
N-0314 Oslo, Norway
Tel.: (+47) 22 85 25 00
Fax: (+47) 22 69 76 60
Abstract
The paper presents the Norwegian Tourism Guide on the Internet, a result of a national coordinated project in the Norwegian tourism industry. The 'guide' is one of the features of the National Information Network in Norway. How this project was established, who the partners are, is described. Marketing and interactivity are discussed to relate the Internet-guide to research in service marketing and communication.
Contents
Introduction
The Norwegian Tourist Guide
Interactive Marketing
Interactivity
Concluding Remarks
ReferencesIntroduction
The growth of the World Wide Web on the Internet has created many opportunities as well as challenges for commercial businesses and industries. One of the challenges for a small or medium size business is to be found by potential customer. This is underlined in a recent article about international marketing in Sloan Management Review (Quelch & Klein, 1996) The authors state that 'the potential for "information overload" is enormous.' (p.66) Even though the lack of rules on the net are critical to electronic commerce (Spar & Bussgang, 1996), this is not so critical for Internet as an information-source. Stephan H. Haeckel, director of strategic studies at IBM's Advanced Business Institute writes(Deighton, 1996); 'suddenly, and basically without warning, the Internet became a plausible and economical solution to a huge problem that has plagued business since 1960s: integrating increasingly heterogeneous IT systems between and within organizations. The Web now offers providers and seekers of information around the globe easy access to one another that proprietary systems cannot match - but can easily benefit from.'(p.159)
It can be hypothized that the net is of particular interest for the travel and tourism industry. In many countries the tourism industry has a high number of international visitors. Thus, the international traveler's have a need for information. In tourism research some scholars go even further and argue that 'gathering, processing and evaluating information can be seen as an integral part of the travel experience' (Snepenger & Snepenger, 1993, p.830). In Norway the industry consists of many small and medium-size businesses. Quite often, the tourists or consumers buy an experience, a holiday-product produced by a number of independent firms. Normally this is true also when the consumer uses a travel agent or a tour operator. Moreover, independent travel has a substantial marked share. In Europe approximately 30% for the summer travel abroad in 1996 did belong to the 'non pre-booking' category according to the European Travel Monitor. Thus, the travelers have an obvious need for information, and the businesses, on the other hand, have an information or marketing-need. According to Pitt et.al. ' many marketing managers have (not) yet given careful consideration to the fully potential of the World Wide Web as a marketing tool, particularly with regard to its potential to move the prospective buyer from being a passive surfer to an interactive customer.' (Pitt, Berthon, & Watson, 1996, p.1)
The purpose of this paper is A) to present the NIN-project and the 'Norwegian Tourist Guide, a web site (guide) launched January 1997, and B) to discuss interactive marketing and interactivity as a basis for further developments for the ongoing Norwegian project.
The Norwegian Tourist Guide
A national initiative for building a National Information Network, NIN (NIN,95) in Norway was established in 1994. A number of application areas was chosen. The tourism industry was chosen as one of them. The goal of the project was to introduce and extend the use of computer networks within the tourism industry, particularly for connecting the numerous small and medium sized businesses around the country. Internet was chosen as the main network, but the project is also following the development of other international network projects such as the EU-project TIM (Maartman-Moe et al.,1994) which are using point-to-point connections through ISDN or ATM-networks (TIM, 1994).
The focus of the project is twofold: using the Net as a tool for co-operation and communication within the industry, and using the Net as a marketing and sales tool. We have started with the last focus and are now building a national framework on World Wide Web (WWW) for marketing and selling Norwegian tourism products.
The project is run by NR, the Norwegian Computing Center , on behalf of NORTRA, the Norwegian Tourist Board. The main activities in this phase were to develop demonstrators and define concepts and strategies. During the pre-project phase we based the concept on three elements (Aanonsen, 1996); the organizational model for cooperation within the industry, the model for financing the system and the technical solution. We chose distributed models for all of the three elements, to encourage participation of tourism businesses at all levels and all over the country. During the implementation phase the user requirements became a significant part of the concept and we had to include this as the fourth basic element of the solution.
National cooperation and strategic alliances
To implement the solutions based on the elements we identified in the pre-project, three main strategic decisions where made. The strategic decisions were to distribute responsibility for information to the regional level, to base the technical solution on regional Destination Information Systems and to establish an alliance with a national Internet Service Provider. The reasons for these decisions and our experiences from implementing them during the first phase is discussed in (Aanonsen, 1997-1) and related to relevant marketing and organisational theories in (Tjostheim, 1997) The basic element of the organizational model is cooperation between tourist boards around the country. The Norwegian tourism business is organized as a hierarchy with NORTRA on top, five regional tourist boards covering most of the country, a number of local tourist boards or "destination companies" on the next level and the suppliers at the bottom. Each regional tourist board is responsible for information from the region and for organising further distribution of responsibility. The goal is to create a network where the responsibility is as close to the information source as possible.
NORTRA and the regional tourist boards are cooperating in a number of ways to promote Norway as a tourism destination on the international market. An agreement for cooperation between NORTRA and these partners is already established for brochure production, participation on fairs and campaigns etc. The cooperation on the Internet follows the same model, and the existing agreement will be extended to include this.
The regional tourist boards play a central role in the model for cooperation in this project. The responsibility for information about each region is distributed to these partners. The tourist boards produce presentations of their regions, provide general practical information and basic information about the suppliers in the region. The basic information may include links to presentations from each business.
The regional tourist board is also responsible for organising the participation of local tourist boards and destinations within their region. These partners will be responsible for producing the local presentations, with practical information about their destination. It is also possible to give these partners responsibility for the basic information about local suppliers and for linking their presentations to the framework.
Figure 1 "The Partners in the Network"The project has also established cooperation with two main technical partners, i.e. a national Internet Service Provider (ISP) and provider of a Destination Information System (DIS) (Sheldon, 1993). The national Internet service provider contributes with technical expertise and in marketing the application on the Net. The national ISP also intended to contribute economically to the development since tourism was also part of their strategy for establishing new business on the Net. This intention changed for different reasons during the first phase of the project, and the tourism industry is taking over the costs, ownership and responsibility for the solution. At the regional and local level the industry may chose any partner as Internet Service Provider.
The other main technical partner is the provider of Destination Information Systems. They are providing a system which the tourist board can use for a number of their tasks, such as brochure production and providing information for the local tourist offices. The DIS also has extended routines for maintaining the quality of the information. Our main reasons for including this partner in the concept is to enable reuse of information and integrate Internet marketing in the set of tasks performed by a tourism organisation. Our goal is both to increase the efficiency at the tourist boards and assure the quality of the information.
The Financial Model
The main element of the financial model is splitting costs and income between the different participants. The national tourist board is responsible for the central parts of the system, for the content at the national level and for marketing the Web-site. Their income will be from regional tourist boards and national providers of tourism products linking to the application. Regional and local tourist boards will finance the regional part of the solution and get the income from providers within their regions.
The Technical Solution
The main motivation for choosing this technical model is to enable reuse of information from regional and local tourist boards. These partners collect and distribute large amounts of information through their brochures production and daily work at the tourism offices. To make this information available on the Web a technical solution based on their Destination Information Systems was chosen. This information is combined with Web-pages which profiles destinations and products. The system consists of a Web-application with a structure of national and regional front pages, a set of menus and icons, maps and search functions accessing a national database. The information in this database is collected from the regional databases which are part of destination information systems.
The basic elements of the technical model is shown in the figure below
Figure 2 "The Technical Model"The content of the Web-site is based on information from brochures produced by the national and regional tourist boards. The design, layout and structure is created for Web by using links, search functions, "clickable" maps etc. The destination presentations is mainly created from the editorial parts of the brochures, which are designed to attract the tourist. It will contains presentations of main attractions, activities, history, culture, nature, geography etc. Useful practical information for travelers will also be part of a destination presentation. Presentations of products and providers will contain general information, "yellow pages" with basic information about each provider, the provider's own presentation and direct access to main regional and national providers.
The information for the "Yellow pages" is stored in the regional databases. This is in many ways the core of the system. The regional tourists boards maintain these databases for a number of purposes. By using them for Internet marketing the tourist boards are able to reuse information efficiently. Local providers will also be able to present information about their products through this database. The regional tourist boards offers them differentiated presentations as either simple "one-line" entries, standardized 1-2 or 3 page presentations or links to their own Web-presentation, by including their URL's in the database.
User Requirements
The tourist can find different types of information through this Web-application. The information is divided into presentations of destinations and presentations of products and providers. The user can navigate through the information by different ways, either by geography, by product type or through the profiling material (Aanonsen, 1997-2). The figure below shows how these three ways lead to the destination and product presentations. These two types of presentations are also connected directly. The connection makes it possible for the users to find all products in one destination and to navigate from a presentation of a product to the presentation of the destination where the product is situated.
Figure 3 "Navigational Structure"The Web-pages in the application will normally consist of three parts, implemented as frames. There is a top field/frame with "Norway" as header and four icons for maps, search, languages and home. There will also be a bottom field/frame containing five pop-up menus implemented in Java. The five menu headers are "Discover Norway", "How to get there", Accommodation", "What to do" and "Travel facts". The sub menus can differ from destination to destination. At the national level we have chosen these menu items:
Figure 4 "Menu items at national level"Interactive Marketing
A recent article in HBR (Deighton, 1996) has the title' The Future of Interactive Marketing' and interestingly it is nearly only about the world wide web, or marketing on the web. Other similar examples could be mentions. However, the term 'interactive marketing function' was introduced in 1979 by C. Gronroos, one of the most prolific services marketing authors (Fisk, Brown, & Bitner, 1995). He states that 'Advertising and pricing may be handled as separate mass marketing activities, thus constituting a mass marketing function. The other marketing function is the management of the buyer/seller interactions, and it can be labeled the interactive marketing function.'(Gronroos, 1979) Later, the concept internal marketing was introduced (Gronroos, 1981), and the mass marketing function was replaced by the term external (traditional) marketing. In internal marketing the employees are seen as customers within the corporation. The three; internal, external and interactive marketing constitute the marketing model presented below (Gronroos, 1990, p.258)
Figure 5 "The Gronroos' Marketing Model"Interactive marketing has become a subset of Relationship Marketing, or to be more specific it has been included in the Nordic perspective on relationship marketing. For further details about relationship marketing see (Aijo, 1996) and (Gronroos, 1994).
The Gronroos model above can be redesign to show the connection between the three types of marketing;
Figure 6 "A Redesigned Marketing Model"The prime relationship in interactive marketing in the tradition of Gronroos, is the physical interaction between the front-end personnel and the customers. However, interaction between sellers systems/machines and customers are identified by several others (Gummesson, 1990), (Fisk et al., 1995) The marketing scholars like Gronroos, build good conceptual models. However, for a more thorough study of interactivity other fields than marketing should be used.
Interactivity
In communication science Rafaeli among others, has studied interactivity. Hence, in this section insights from one of his articles (Rafaeli, 1988) is presented. 'Formally stated, interactivity is an expression of the extent that in a given series of communication exchanges, any third (or later) transmission (or message) is related to the degree to which previous exchanges referred to even earlier transmissions' (p.111) Thus, communication can be 'placed' along a continuum of interactivity. For full interactivity to occur, communication roles need to be interchangeable: role assignment and turn-taking are to be non-automatic or nearly so. He argues that the following dimensions 'do no capture full (our emphasis) interactivity even though they are referred to as such in the literature; bidirectionality, quick response, bandwidth, user control, amount of user activity, ratio of user to medium activity, feedback, transparency, social presence, and artificial intelligence.' (p.115) The essence in the distinction here is in the differences between two-way communication, reaction and interaction. Responsiveness is a core feature of interactivity. Two-way communication is present when messages flow bilaterally. Reactive settings require, in addition, that later messages refer to (or cohere with) earlier ones. Full interactivity (responsiveness) differs from reaction in the incorporation of reference to the content, nature, form, or just the presence of earlier reference. Quasi-interactive (reactive) and full interactive sequences differ from non-interactive communication in requiring that sender and receiver roles are interchangeable with each subsequent message. Interactivity requires that communicants respond to each other. The content of the response may have one of the two forms: regular response - reaction to previous messages - or response - which, itself, acknowledges prior responses. The conditions of for full interactivity are fulfilled when later states in a message sequence depend on the reaction in earlier transactions, as well as on the content exchanges.
A related issue is medium transparency, or vividness. According to Rafaeli 'transparency, (is) the degree to which the user or interactant is aware of the presence of a mediating entity, (and) could be understood as a gauge of the salience of the medium's intervention in the communication process.' (p.116) Transparency is a measure of a passive quality, it communicates an inadequacy that is not under the communicators control. Interactivity, on the other hand, is an active quality; it is incorporated purposively. Transparency is a quality of media that is related to interactivity, but must be distinguished from it. Then it is asked what interactivity does? Rafaeli answers that acceptance and satisfaction are the most obvious set of effects increased interactivity sought after and documented in the literature. Some less obvious ones include 'effects on performance quality, motivation, sense of fun, learning, normativity and extremism, and sociability as overt behavior of users.' (p.123) Several empirical findings concerning these positive effects are referred to.
Since this study of Rafaeli, there has been a shift in focus towards mediated communication. The term telepresence was coined by Marvin Minsky (1980) in reference to teleoperation systems for remote manipulation of physical objects. (Steuer, 1992) It refers to any medium-induced sense of presence, and is formally defined by Steuer 'as the experience of presence in an environment by means of a communication medium.' Steuer focuses on the properties of the mediated environment and the relationship of individuals to that environment. Rafaeli, on the other hand, emphasize engagement or involvement (e.g. interaction as an active quality). According to Steuer, interactivity 'is the extent to which users can participate in modifying the form and content of a mediated environment in real time.' (Steuer, 1992, p.84) On this basis, he presents the following model;
Figure 7 "The Telepresence Model"Speed refers to the rate of at which input can be assimilated into the mediated environment, range refers to the number of possible action at any given time, and mapping to the ability of a system to map its controls to changes in the mediated environment in a natural and predictable manner. Breadth (or sensory breadth) refers to the number of sensory dimensions simultaneously present and is closely related to media concurrency and media richness. Depth refers to the resolution within each of these perceptual channels. (Steuer, 1992) Depth is highly correlated to media band with. Vividness and interactivity can also be viewed as content characteristics of the web. The strength of the experience of telepresence is a function of the extent to which a person feels present in the hypermedia computer-mediated environment, rather than in the immediate physical environment. (Hoffman & Novak, 1996)
Concluding Remarks
How the Norwegian Tourism Guide is used, if it is used as a tool for information-gathering by travelers, if the users become repeat visitors etc., is therefor a function of vividness, interactivity (characteristics of the web) as well as the specific characteristics of the guide. Further studies of the Norwegian Tourist Guide should focus on these aspect. Developments of the search functionality, navigation by maps are important aspect which can be identified on a qualitative basis. However, user-studies are particularly relevant to identify if speed are critical for the users of the guide, and to find (or fine-tune) the balance of speed and depth (plus to some extent range). Depth depends directly upon the amount of data encoded and the data bandwidth of the transmission channel. The NIN-project in Norway continues, and how it develops is due to a high number of factors. The Norwegian Computing Center has an important role in the development of the project. However, it is industry-based and the end-result of the project should be an independent tourism network.
References
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