Does It Make Sense to Sell Destination to Internal Publics?

Nimit Chowdhary

Abstract


This paper talks about a unique concept of educating stakeholders to be more sensitized towards tourists. In academic world this is an internal marketing intervention. The idea is that a tourist’s experience at any destination to a large extent depends upon the how the stakeholders including the local community behave with them. While most countries talk about an external marketing campaign, in India, besides the popular external marketing campaign of “Incredible India”, there is an internal marketing campaign popularly known as “Atithi devo bhava”. Internal marketing calls for educating the stakeholders for an understanding of the destinations’ tourism objectives, operational priorities on one hand, and impact of this effort on the values, beliefs, priorities and culture of the stakeholders on the other. The present study tries to investigate the affects of internal promotional campaigns on the perception of general public who are the internal stakeholders at the destination.

Keywords


educating stakeholders, internal marketing, tourism

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