Individualized Tourism Brochures as a Novel Approach to Mass Customization

ABSTRACT

Tourism is an information intensive business and technological advances have transformed the way in which information is stored, managed and transmitted to potential visitors. Despite the wide adoption of Internet technologies in tourism marketing, information is still largely disseminated through printed brochures that have remained unchanged and unaffected by personalization trends. This conceptual paper argues that technological innovations such as digital printing allow the creation of dynamic, customized brochures at a lower cost than that of conventional tourist brochures. The main aim of this paper is to propose a framework for cross-media customization of tourism and travel brochures. The paper concludes that empirical research is necessary to assess the optimum levels of individualization for tourism brochures.

KEYWORDS:

• Mass customization
• individualization
• cross-media communications
• variable data documents
• tourism brochure
• marketing