12 There are still many gaps in the typology literature. For example,
little has been written about the business tourist.
These criticisms are not intended to decry the idea of typologies but,
rather, to illustrate how difficult it is to develop convincing typologies.
Perhaps it also proves that there will never be one typology that reflects
the behaviour of all tourists. Instead we may need as many typologies
as there are tourism products, tourism markets, countries and cultures!
The marketing applications of typologies
Notwithstanding their considerable limitations, these typologies, while
not developed with marketing in mind, have a potential role to play in
tourism marketing. This could clearly contribute to decisions over
product development, price and distribution.
However, their main role could well be in the field of promotion,
particularly in the design of the messages which tourism organizations
attach to their products, for different groups of potential customers. For
example:
* ‘travellers’ want to be convinced that the holiday they may buy is not
the type of ‘package’ bought by ‘tourists’
* Perreault, Dorden and Dorden’s ‘budget travellers’ need to be told
that their prospective holiday package represents good value for
money
* Plog’s ‘allocentrics’ need to have the adventurous aspect of a product
highlighted for them
* Dalen’s ‘traditional idealists’ must be persuaded that their desired
destination is safe.
On the other hand, practitioners would find it difficult to do these
things, as current methodologies would make it very difficult and
expensive for them to identify each of these groups and target different
messages to different groups.
Therefore, it is perhaps time for us to move on to consider ways of
classifying tourists that are devised specifically to make marketing
more effective.
Market segmentation
Market segmentation has been well defined by Dibb et al. (2001) as: ‘The
process of dividing a total market into groups of people with relatively
similar product needs, for the purpose of designing a marketing mix
that precisely matches the needs of individuals in a segment.’
This clearly illustrates the fact that market segmentation is a form of
consumer classification designed specifically to serve the marketing
function. This is one difference between segmentation and the typologies
we discussed earlier, which were largely developed by academics
who were generally not concerned with their potential role in marketing.
The second key difference is that whereas the typologies have been
devised specifically in relation to tourism, segmentation is a concept
derived from general marketing across all industries.
Classic segmentation criteria and their application in tourism
There are five classic ways of segmenting markets, in other words, the
consumer population can be subdivided on the basis of five different
criteria, into groups which share similar characteristics as buyers. We
will now discuss each of these in turn, in terms of their use in the
tourism industry.