Best Practice Marketing for Regional Tourism Destinations

This article reports on destination marketing best practices from 21 regional destinations around Australia. The results advocate an integrative approach to destination marketing that aligns with destination management and development objectives. From this, a framework is developed, within which nine best practice principles are identified as essential to successful and sustainable marketing of regional destinations. The key initiatives used to achieve success are discussed in detail, highlighting the need for destination stakeholders to foster a cooperative and strategic approach and ensure consistent design and delivery of a destination brand and image which is supported by tactical advertising and promotional strategies, effective visitor information services, and events to support the destination brand and image to target appropriate visitor markets.     

The implementation of computer based systems

The difficulty of implementing planned change in an organization is legend. In the last 20 years the implementation of computer based models and systems in particular has received a significant amount of attention in the form of hundreds of conference presentations, published case studies, and research reports. Yet, system implementation failures are still prevalent. p]This paper surveys the implementation literature primarily in three fields: management information systems, operations research/management science, and production-inventory management. Common difficulties are identified and managerial proverbs, consultants' insights, statistically verified procedures, research conclusions. and other such documented wisdom for improving the chances of implementation are analyzed. p]A classification scheme is developed which divides this documented material into three diverse categories of pitfalls in implementation. These categories are then discussed from the perspective of providing managers with the information needed to analyze their own organization in terms of the likelihood of successfully implementing such computer based information systems as Material Requirements Planning (MRP).     

Shark bytes: message sensation value and emotional appeals in shark diving websites

Websites designed to promote risky activities provide a novel context for studying the role of emotional appeals and message sensation value (MSV) in risk messages in order to ultimately understand the type of messages that motivate people to engage in risk behaviors. Framed in theories of message design and emotion, this study investigates representations of threat, efficacy, and the extent to which risk messages appeal to a range of positive and negative emotions through the examination of 53 shark diving websites using content analysis and computer generated linguistic analysis. Results indicate that few websites provide explicit threat information (i.e. severity and susceptibility) but many do present implicit threats. Efficacy-related messages were present on all websites. Positive emotion was more common than negative emotion and there is little representation of the traditional components of MSV. Implications for theory development and communication about risk-seeking are addressed.     

Product cannibalization and the role of prices

The role of brand prices in contributing to product cannibalization is examined. Price elasticities and reference price theory are used to provide a theoretical foundation and empirical test for the impact of a firm's cheap brand on one of its expensive brands. Results are consistent with the conclusion that the market share of the company's premium brand was cannibalized by a growth in sales of its cheap brand.     

Organizational communities of practice: Review,analysis, and role of information and communications technologies

Information and communications technologies (ICTs) play a key role in supporting Communities of Practice (CoPs). A review of the extant literature reveals six factors that facilitate or constrain the development, sustenance, and effectiveness of CoPs that, in turn, enable generative and degenerative structures and behaviors that affect epistemic environments within Organizational Communities of Practice (orgCoPs). OrgCoPs are accepted as beneficial organizational learning structures and need to be deliberately designed and cultivated. The materiality of ICTs that is used to support orgCoPs may play a role in supporting or opposing seeding structures. The literature review further reveals five material properties that describe the relationship between the orgCoPs and the technologies used to support it. We argue that these distinct but intersecting properties are germane to understanding the role that ICTs play in supporting orgCoPs and propose that the future work on orgCoPs could be nuanced if examined through the lens of ICTs’ materiality.     

Time-varying inflation persistence in the Euro area

This paper investigates how inflation persistence in the Euro area has evolved between 1991 and 2006. Employing an ARMA(1,11) model with time-varying autoregressive parameter, we find that inflation persistence has fallen markedly since the third stage of the EMU began in January 1999 and inflation no longer exhibits unit-root behaviour.     

China's export growth and the China safeguard: threats to the world trading system?

Abstract Is there evidence from China's pre‐WTO accession period that newly imposed U.S. or EU import restrictions deflect Chinese exports to third markets? We examine this question by drawing on a newly constructed data set of U.S. and EU product‐level import restrictions on Chinese trade imposed between 1992 and 2001, and we estimate their impact on Chinese exports to alternative markets. We find no systematic evidence that the import restrictions imposed during this period resulted in Chinese exports surging to third markets. To the contrary, there is weak evidence of a chilling effect on China's exports to third markets.     

Worth the Risk? The Behavioural Path to Well‐Being

There is increasing interest in the ‘economics of happiness’, reflected in the volume of articles appearing in mainstream economics journals exploring the major determinants of self‐reported well‐being. We contribute by exploring the factors influencing how satisfied farmers are with their quality of life. We find that farm income, subjective perceptions relating to the adequacy of household income, debt, health and personal characteristics such as age and relationship status are significantly associated with farmers’ self‐reported life satisfaction. While significantly associated with farm income, farm structural variables such as farm size, farm type and the presence of a farm successor were not found to be significantly related with life satisfaction. Our results also suggest that farmers who are more risk averse enjoy significantly lower levels of both life satisfaction and farm income than their more risk seeking or risk neutral counterparts. We suggest that, in the same way that risk aversion inhibits farmers from making choices that could lead to an increase in their income, it may also constrain farmers (and the wider public at large) from engaging in certain types of behaviours that could lead to an increase in their self‐reported quality of life. Finally, we find that while farm income is significantly related to self‐reported life satisfaction, the direct correlation between these variables is weak, suggesting that farmer life satisfaction can be distinct from business success.