Etic Interpreting of Naïve Subjective Personal Introspections of Tourism Behavior: Analyzing Visitors' Stories About Experiencing Mumbai, Seoul, Singapore and Tokyo

Purpose – To demonstrate how brand netnography is useful in showing how visitors interpret the places, people and situations that they experience when traveling. Design/methodology/approach – Through analysis of online consumer stories about their travel experiences, this paper probes how visitors...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Martin, D., Woodside, Arch, Dehuang, N.
Format: Journal Article
Published: Emerald Group Publishing Ltd. 2007
Subjects:
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/40459
_version_ 1848755877073387520
author Martin, D.
Woodside, Arch
Dehuang, N.
author_facet Martin, D.
Woodside, Arch
Dehuang, N.
author_sort Martin, D.
building Curtin Institutional Repository
collection Online Access
description Purpose – To demonstrate how brand netnography is useful in showing how visitors interpret the places, people and situations that they experience when traveling. Design/methodology/approach – Through analysis of online consumer stories about their travel experiences, this paper probes how visitors interpret their experiences while visiting cities in Asia. Deconstructing texts written by consumers via Heider's balance theory provides the method of analysis for samples of both positive and negative travel experiences of foreign visitors. Findings – Mapping consumer experiences shows immediate and downstream positive and negative associations of concepts, events, and outcomes in visitors' stories. These maps include descriptions of how visitors live specific destination's unique promises. Research limitations/implications – The population of bloggers who report their experiences may not be representative of the population of all visitors. Practical implications – Blog-journal stories provides the opportunity to collect emic interpretative data unobtrusively. These stories have the potential to influence substantial numbers of future visitors who go online in search of first-person unbiased, unrehearsed reports of others' destination experiences. First-person (emic) reports enable managers of places (brands) to learn and talk in dialects of customers. Originality/value – This paper provides a revisionist proposal to Holt's five-step strategy for building destinations as iconic brands and suggestions for tourism management. The revisionist view includes interpreting consumers' own interpretations of their place experiences.
first_indexed 2025-11-14T09:03:17Z
format Journal Article
id curtin-20.500.11937-40459
institution Curtin University Malaysia
institution_category Local University
last_indexed 2025-11-14T09:03:17Z
publishDate 2007
publisher Emerald Group Publishing Ltd.
recordtype eprints
repository_type Digital Repository
spelling curtin-20.500.11937-404592017-09-13T13:38:56Z Etic Interpreting of Naïve Subjective Personal Introspections of Tourism Behavior: Analyzing Visitors' Stories About Experiencing Mumbai, Seoul, Singapore and Tokyo Martin, D. Woodside, Arch Dehuang, N. Travel Tourism South East Asia Far East Storytelling South Asia Purpose – To demonstrate how brand netnography is useful in showing how visitors interpret the places, people and situations that they experience when traveling. Design/methodology/approach – Through analysis of online consumer stories about their travel experiences, this paper probes how visitors interpret their experiences while visiting cities in Asia. Deconstructing texts written by consumers via Heider's balance theory provides the method of analysis for samples of both positive and negative travel experiences of foreign visitors. Findings – Mapping consumer experiences shows immediate and downstream positive and negative associations of concepts, events, and outcomes in visitors' stories. These maps include descriptions of how visitors live specific destination's unique promises. Research limitations/implications – The population of bloggers who report their experiences may not be representative of the population of all visitors. Practical implications – Blog-journal stories provides the opportunity to collect emic interpretative data unobtrusively. These stories have the potential to influence substantial numbers of future visitors who go online in search of first-person unbiased, unrehearsed reports of others' destination experiences. First-person (emic) reports enable managers of places (brands) to learn and talk in dialects of customers. Originality/value – This paper provides a revisionist proposal to Holt's five-step strategy for building destinations as iconic brands and suggestions for tourism management. The revisionist view includes interpreting consumers' own interpretations of their place experiences. 2007 Journal Article http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/40459 10.1108/17506180710729592 Emerald Group Publishing Ltd. restricted
spellingShingle Travel
Tourism
South East Asia
Far East
Storytelling
South Asia
Martin, D.
Woodside, Arch
Dehuang, N.
Etic Interpreting of Naïve Subjective Personal Introspections of Tourism Behavior: Analyzing Visitors' Stories About Experiencing Mumbai, Seoul, Singapore and Tokyo
title Etic Interpreting of Naïve Subjective Personal Introspections of Tourism Behavior: Analyzing Visitors' Stories About Experiencing Mumbai, Seoul, Singapore and Tokyo
title_full Etic Interpreting of Naïve Subjective Personal Introspections of Tourism Behavior: Analyzing Visitors' Stories About Experiencing Mumbai, Seoul, Singapore and Tokyo
title_fullStr Etic Interpreting of Naïve Subjective Personal Introspections of Tourism Behavior: Analyzing Visitors' Stories About Experiencing Mumbai, Seoul, Singapore and Tokyo
title_full_unstemmed Etic Interpreting of Naïve Subjective Personal Introspections of Tourism Behavior: Analyzing Visitors' Stories About Experiencing Mumbai, Seoul, Singapore and Tokyo
title_short Etic Interpreting of Naïve Subjective Personal Introspections of Tourism Behavior: Analyzing Visitors' Stories About Experiencing Mumbai, Seoul, Singapore and Tokyo
title_sort etic interpreting of naïve subjective personal introspections of tourism behavior: analyzing visitors' stories about experiencing mumbai, seoul, singapore and tokyo
topic Travel
Tourism
South East Asia
Far East
Storytelling
South Asia
url http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/40459