Page 27 - Azerbaijan State University of Economics

Konstantia Darvidou, Evangelos Siskos: Efficiency of International Tourism Marketing
for The Promotion of Tourist Products of Greek Companies in The European Market

The factors for accomplishment of vision included joint participation in European
development programmes, understanding of the community, partnerships (between local
authorities, individuals, academic and research centres, enterprises), innovative
promotional policies of local authorities, assessment of city’s distinctive features, capacity
and knowledge of local authorities etc. Experts noted that the event website was most
developed. The components with intermediary level of implementations were the city
website, city image guides, promotional packages for specific target markets, participation
in European cultural networks, links with other cities and countries. Less developed policies
included sponsorship packages, strategic marketing plans, participation of city actors in the
city promotion strategies.

The next analysed case was about Museum of Tobacco in Kavala, Greece (Metaxas, 2013).
Interaction between a general (city) image and a special (museum) image was in the core
of the theoretical marketing model. It was noted that marketing should not be limited only
to tourist guides, brochures and municipalities webpages. Efficient marketing should
consider real needs and expectations of the target markets.

Amoraidis et al. (2021) described the concept of sustainable marketing in contrast to
social and ecological limitations of conventional corporate marketing philosophy, and
analysed approved funds for tourism promotion in the Greek regions, tourist over-night
staying and tourism saturation. Katsoni (2015) promoted the cultural landscape approach
in marketing management and described activities of Environmental Information Centres.

But there is a lack of studies that assess final efficiency of various marketing tools.
According to a survey by Velentza & Metaxas (2023), most accommodation businesses
considered that digital marketing tools helped them to improve readability and
company’s image, public relations, interactivity and feedback, business analytics,
timeliness of services, to increase product lifecycle, income, market share and expand
into new markets, to reduce costs for marketing and services of intermediaries.
Nevertheless, most companies considered that they still lacked knowledge and training.
Some worried about the costs of digital marketing, lack of time, data security, legal
limitations, management mentality, lack of vision for expansion, annoying
advertisements, no face-to-face contact, difficulty of targeting some segments,
information readability and increased international competition. Only few businesses
had problem with language, access speed and technophobia. Nevertheless, they used
subjective views of the respondents with Likert scale without objective statistical
efficiency indicators such as increase in income of tourist companies or tourist arrivals.

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