The effects of joint brand advertising on tourists’ behavioural response

Abstract

In recent years business collaborations between business entities are becoming more common in various forms, such as joint brand advertising. In the tourism industry, despite joint brand advertising being one of the most applied marketing tools for both travel intermediaries and Destination Marketing Organisations (DMOs), to date; however, little research has involved investigating the effects of joint brand advertising. Furthermore, none of the prior research was aimed at uncovering the mechanism underlying the relation between joint brand advertising and tourists’ behavioural response. This research is aimed at addressing these gaps by focusing on collaborative marketing activities, specifically, joint brand advertising, within the tourism context. Also, it involves investigating the meditator role of product interest on the relationship between joint brand advertising and tourists’ behavioural intention as well as probing whether brand reputation is considered as a boundary condition or not.
For the current research, two experimental studies were conducted using between-subject designs and adverts as stimuli. The first study was a field experiment conducted through display banner adverts in the Google Display Network. The findings support tourists’ behavioural response (i.e. click through behaviour) towards joint brand advertising.. The second study was a lab experiment performed with 180 people under three different conditions. The results suggest that joint brand advertising significantly increases potential tourists’ interest in the product, which in turn, leads to favourable behavioural intention towards visiting a particular destination. However, this is supported for joint brand advertising with a highly-reputed travel intermediary brand and not for with a lesser-reputed one.
This thesis contributes to the literature the revelation that, DMOs should partner with travel intermediaries in advertising to trigger potential tourists’ exploration behaviours, to strategically develop their brand and to overcome free-rider problems. In this regard, they should promote their well-known products through partnerships with highly-reputed travel intermediary brands and their niche or new products by partnering with lesser-reputed ones.

Date of Award	Aug 2020
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Portsmouth
Supervisor	Giampaolo Viglia (Supervisor) & Yuksel Ekinci (Supervisor)