Assignment 2. SCIENTIFIC ARTICLE ON (INTERNET) MARKETING

The article I like to sumerize concerns online-offline synergies in marketing: DMO evidence from Switzerland. The authors of the article are Ph.D (Econ.) Juho Pesonen, Centre for Tourism Studies, University of Eastern Finland and Ph.D Alessandro Inversini, School of Tourism, Bournemouth University. I post this in English, while the article is in English.

The background and purpose of the study
Online marketing and advertising is crowing rapidly. Online advertising is conquering space from so called traditional advertising media. Important questions for studying come therefore up (Naik and Peters 2009): "How much should managers allocate to online media given their spending in all other media?" as well as "Do online media interact with offline media to influence marketing outcomes such as brand consideration and brand sales? If so, how?"    
The study is related to create more understanding of across online-offline media synergy in multi-national tourism context while the main research question is: How offline marketing drives website visits?   

Definitions
DMO is Destination Management Organization which are in the key role in the marketing and management of tourism destination (Buhalis 2003).
Offline marketing is marketing actions by traditional media like television, radio, newspapers, magazines and mail.
Online marketing is marketing actions by Internet including banner advertising, social media campaigns, e-mail campaigns and search engine advertising.

The study and the results
In the study wide range of information from a Swiss DMO organization was collected during the period January 2009-December 2011. Both analysis of website visit data and Google Analytics click stream analysis program were used. Also number of monthly marketing actions or campaigns on different source markets in neighboring countries was obtained. They were mostly advertising campaigns. The data was analyzed by SPSS 20.

As a lag of this study can be considered the fact that marketing does not lead to direct action at once, but it can take longer time to have an effect (Dwyer et al. 2013). The study result shows that ability of offline marketing campaigns to drive website depends on the market. In Swiss market (domestic market) and English speaking market there are no effects while Italian and French markets offline marketing seems to drive lot of users to the website while in the German market there is a very lengthy lag between offline marketing and coming to website.

Conclusion and discussion
It can be argued that there are synergies between offline and online tourism marketing, but it is highly depend on markets. Offline marketing has therefore different role in different markets. These differences should be acknowledged and studied more closely. The fact that ways of DMO’s marketing were not considered in this study was a limitation of this study. Only the number of marketing actions in each target markets were studied. Correlation analysis does not therefore explain the differences at the different markets.

The report can be find from web.

Sources
Buhalis, D. 2003. ETourism: Information Technology for Strategic Tourism Management. Pearson Education.

Dwyer, L., Pham, T., Forsyth, P. and Spurr, R. 2013. “Destination Marketing of Australia: Return on Investment.” Journal of Travel Research. doi: 10.1177/0047287513497836

Nike, P. and Peters, K. 2009. A Hierarchical Marketing Communications Model of Online and Offline Media Synergies. Journal of Interactive Marketing. Vol. 23; 288-29