TABLE OF CONTENTS Although marketing is a new field of academic study as compared to such fields as chemistry and philosophy, marketing is not a new human activity. After all, people have always produced surplus goods or services that they wanted to barter or sell. To do so they first needed to find someone willing to make the exchange. The practice of marketing simply takes this basic human behavior and plans its strategic implementation.
Tourism is also a new field of academic study, but it too is an activity with a long history. After all, people traveling to visit other places is not a recent phenomenon. As early as the religious pilgrimages of the Middle Ages, seeing the sites was always a part of the reason for undertaking a trip.
The marketing of tourism is simply applying the appropriate marketing concepts to planning a strategy to attract visitors to a destination, whether resort, city, region, or country. While there are many definitions of marketing, the definition used by the American Marketing Association on their website, www.marketingpower.com, perhaps defines marketing best: "the process of planning and executing the conception, pricing, promotion, and distribution of ideas, goods, and services to create exchanges that satisfy individual and organizational goals."
The definition describes marketing as an exchange that satisfies both the individual (the visitor) and the organization (in this case, the city and its citizens). Unfortunately marketing is sometimes misunderstood as only selling; with the city convincing the tourist to visit even if...
