Destination Iran: An analysis of tourism marketing message characteristics

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Thesis (PhD Doctorate)
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Dept Tourism, Sport & Hot Mgmt
Griffith Business School
Visitor attitude is a critical component that affects potential tourists’ decision making and, ultimately, destination choice. Tourism marketers seek to influence prospective visitors’ attitudes through reinforcing existing associations with the destination or creating new associations. In addition, marketers use persuasive marketing stimuli to affect associations with the destination. In particular, the design or characteristics of marketing stimuli such as the perceived credibility and emotive aspects exert a significant impact on potential tourists’ attitudes towards, and associations with, the destination. Furthermore, the characteristics of marketing messages can influence tourists’ cognitive and affective evaluations of a place, confidence in and consideration of a holiday destination. Social psychologists believe that message characteristics influence attitude via three dimensions of thinking: the amount of thought; valence of thinking; and thought confidence. The assertion is that the cognitive engagement with a message and the favourability of thoughts, along with an individual’s confidence in their thoughts predict attitude. However, tourism scholars have investigated only the first two dimensions of thinking: the amount and valence of thoughts. Therefore, the role of thought confidence has been understudied in the tourism context. Thought confidence forms part of the self-validation hypothesis, which asserts that thought generation is not enough to influence attitude, rather people need to feel confident in their thinking (Petty, Briñol & Tormala, 2002). Although social psychologists have examined the influence of a number of variables on attitude, the role of emotion, and specifically emotional arousal, is not well discussed in the self-validation hypothesis literature. This thesis aims to fill the gap in the tourism and social psychology literature through adapting the main elements of previous theories of attitude – notably the elaboration likelihood m