GERMAN MARKET ANALYSIS: TOURIST BEHAVIOR RESEARCH
Case: Rock and Lake.
ผลงานวิจัยของ Nadezhda Koppalova
The research problem of this thesis was to identify a potential tourist market segment in Germany for the Finnish company Rock and Lake which provides accommodation and activities.
The main objectives of this work were to identify the current trends of a German travel market in selecting vacation destinations, study the attitude of German tourists towards different types of vacations and holiday parameters, analyze German tourist market segmentation and analyze “Rock and Lake’s” services in order to define its competitive advantage when targeting a foreign market.
The thesis consists of four main parts: theoretical framework, analysis of Rock and Lake brand and tourism in Finland, methodology and data collection and market analysis.
To begin with, in the theory part it was necessary to study the concepts of competition and strategic management for later company analysis. Another chapter deals first with consumer behaviour in general and then with features of tourist behaviour, such as peculiarities in tourist decision-making process and the concept of holiday decision. Afterwards, market segmentation is presented first in a broad sense and then applied specifically to tourist markets.
The company and industry analyses chapter includes a description of the company Rock and Lake, SWOT analysis and analysis of the tourism industry in Finland.
The research approach selected to perform the market analysis was netnography. Four research methods were utilized: analysis of statistics, online survey, chat interview and netnographic observation. The methodology chapter describes in detail the approach and methods, first in theory and then all the steps in the data collection in practice.
The market analysis chapter creates an image of the German tourist market based on the gathered research data. Conclusions are given as a summary of comments related to the research problem and questions with some recommendations suggested to Rock and Lake.