The Interplay of Travelers’ Psychological Distance, Language Abstraction, and Message Appeal Type in Social Media Advertising

Abstract

Effectiveness of destination advertising to potential tourists has been enhanced with the use of personalized orientation. After an online search for information about a destination, individuals are exposed to advertisements related to the destination on their social media newsfeed. However, further understanding is warranted in terms of how these destination messages should be crafted. Thus, our research aims to uncover how destination advertising design, message appeal type, and language abstraction level interact with a message recipient’s psychological distance to his or her trip to influence consumer response to the advertising. Based on construal level theory, we conducted a scenario-based experiment, using manipulated messages and psychological distance state to assess message effectiveness. The findings show that the type of message design respondents favor can vary either by perceived temporal distance to their travel plans or spatial distance to the travel destination.

Web 2.0 and Destination Marketing: Current Trends and Future Directions

“…(2) the measurement of engagement with DMOs/NTOs' SNSs [9,21]; (3) the analysis of the drivers of travelers' engagement with and contribution to DMOs/NTOs' SNSs [42,43]; (4) new methodologies to measure travelers' attitudes towards destinations and attractions by means of SNSs' content analysis [20,22,30,44]; (5) tourists' destination experiences with DMOs' SNSs [45][46][47][48][49]; and (6) the impact of DMOs' SNSs on online travelers' attitudes, visit and recommendation intentions, reactions to marketing and advertising messages, and bookings [29,31,33,[50][51][52][53][54][55][56][57][58]. Overall, and regardless of the topic covered, there is a prevalence of studies on Facebook (31 studies), Twitter (21 studies), YouTube (15 studies) and TripAdvisor (10 studies).…”

“…The drivers of adoption and acceptance of Web 2.0 technologies by DMOs and destination marketers have been examined in relation to several factors: the opportunities and costs of developing SNSs [19,56,[64][65][66]; the budget, resources and time constraints [9,36,49,67,68]; the skills, knowledge, experience and competences needed to deploy Web 2.0 technologies professionally [23,69]; the social capital and trust requirements [35]; the need to develop and nurture a virtual community [70]; and the connectivity to other ICT websites [58].…”

“…The drivers of adoption and acceptance of Web 2.0 technologies by DMOs' SNSs users and travelers have been analyzed in relation to several factors: demographic characteristics of the users/travelers [47,54]; motivation to visit the destination [29]; information sources needed [29]; past experience of destination visitation [33]; psychological, temporal and spatial distance to/from the destination [58]; identity and self-concepts [43,53]; emotions [25]; type of platform adopted [29]; level of interactivity [15,22,53,71]; media exposure [28]; and devices used [49].…”

“…The usage patterns, practices and processes of Web 2.0 technologies by DMOs and destination marketers have covered several aspects such as the quality and quantity of users [50]; the type of medium deployed [39,40,72]; the content type [50,66,73,74]; the destination marketers' posting timing and frequency [9,21]; the use of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to measure the effectiveness of promotional and advertising campaigns [26,58]; and the comparison and benchmarking of SNSs' usage practices across multiple DMOs [8,34,64,67,71,[75][76][77].…”

Expert Online Review Platforms: Interactions between Specialization, Experience, and User Power

“…In today’s online market where review platforms must compete constantly with existing platforms and newcomers, the findings in this study provide useful practical implications for platform developers, marketers, and tourists. Previous studies have shown that the appeal of social media advertisements depends on a diversity factors that are attributable to both platform and tourists (Wang and Lehto 2019). First, the findings suggest that the effects of expert power depend on the power of users.…”