Cross-cultural promotional competence: a comparison of student and DMO marketing text

ABSTRACT

This paper considers whether an inductive, collaborative information and communication technology-based approach to learning promotional language may help non-native English speakers produce destination material that can be effective in a real-world context. At a Japanese university, tourism communication students collected examples of professional language from the web in a shared database which they subsequently consulted in producing domestic destination websites in English. Text written by students for a destination was compared in a survey to text from an official English website for the destination. The survey measured the reaction of potential tourists in terms of trust in accuracy, expectations of service, and destination interest. Results indicate that the student material engendered stronger overall destination image, based on source credibility, interest in travel to the destination, and higher service expectations. The study considers implications of the results in terms of the effect of writing quality on destination image, and argues for the importance of cross-cultural marketing competence in tourism education.

KEYWORDS:

• Tourism education
• destination image
• destination management
• ICT
• cross-cultural education
• Japan

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Respondents were identified through Survey Monkey’s audience targeting feature.