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REJOINDERS AND COMMENTARY

This Department publishes rejoinders, commentaries, and rebuttals on the con-tents of  Annals . Attempt should be made to submit contributions to the AssociateEditor for   Rejoinders and Commentary , Graham Dann (Department of Tourism

and Leisure, University of Luton, Luton, Beds. LU1 3JU, UK. Emailgraham.dann@luton.ac.uk).

Annals of Tourism Research,  Vol. 31, No. 2, pp. 467–469, 2004©  2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Printed in Great Britain0160-7383/$30.00

 www.elsevier.com/locate/atoures

The Context of Third World Tourism Marketing

Dennison Nash

University of Connecticut, USA

The article by Echtner and Prasad (Annals   30:660–682), in many waysexemplary, still offers room for critical comment. In it, the authors have usedpost-colonial theory  and a developing tradition of  advertising content  analysisby predecessors like Moeran (l983), Adams (l984), and Reimer (l990) in orderto illuminate the prejudices of “First Worlders” towards the Third World. They employ a reasonable theory and an adequate methodology to make their case. What, then, is there to criticize in this paper?

The criticism here has to do with something rather basic in the approach

adopted by the authors: a level of analysis devoted to cultural facts as exem-plified in what they refer to as “narrative” or “discourse”. From this standpoint,Echtner and Prasad discover that First World marketers seem to be doing littlemore than recycling views that have been in place since colonial days. Theseattitudes can be taken to be a form of post-colonial thought, an ideology that originated in the days of the great Western empires (Said 1979).

This finding was startling to this writer because of conversations he had held with market researchers over the years. Those experts were of the opinion that marketers were constantly trying to gain some competitive advantage, and,that in order to achieve this goal, they needed continual information about the nature of the constantly changing market. They argued that even withapparently static markets, there sometimes were sufficient differences to carveout a new market niche. However, according to Echtner and Prasad, this situ-ation did not appear to be happening even in a period of increasing tourismto the Third World. The market for that  kind of tourism, as envisaged by theadvertising industry and in accord with  Bruner’s earlier (1991)   analysis, wasimmutable in its predilections.

Unfortunately, the article by Echtner and Prasad, seen in the light of these

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468   REJOINDERS AND COMMENTARY 

conversations, did not help resolve a problem associated with their con-clusions. This writer wanted to know how an alleged assiduity in market research could come up with the same view of the Third World year after year. Not that it would be impossible, only that some variation ought to have

been noted and perhaps acted upon by the advertisers and their minions.Maybe they have not been asleep and have, indeed, been keeping track of Third World touristic motivational trends, so that what Echtner, Prasad andtheir predecessors have said is correct. Perhaps they have been alert to vari-ations and changes in their small, but burgeoning, market. They may evenhave entertained input from denizens of the Third World. Perhaps some of them, even though taking a more enlightened view, nevertheless have felt constrained by considerations that relate to the  “bottom line”. On the otherhand, of course, there is always a possibility that this writer has been badly informed by those market researchers, at least as far Third World tourismmarketing is concerned. Finally, some advertisers could be operating in the

 way they do because the relevant market is still comparatively minute andpowerless, or perhaps the marketers are incompetent, or both.Unfortunately, if academics continue to follow along with the evidence pro-

 vided by Echtner and Prasad, they will never know how their advertisements were produced. To do that and find out what their advertisers have been upto, the authors would have to move out of the library and into the productivearea of the advertising workplace where the  “cultural facts”  which they haveanalyzed have been created. They would have to break out of their theoreti-cally imposed confinement and begin to explore a First World workplace,about which people know comparatively little. They  might even employ someethnographic  fieldwork to get at the relevant facts. (Nash 2003).

If, on the other hand, the authors choose to pursue their hopes for someThird World   “resistance”   (a solution which is proposed at the end of theirarticle), they would have a bit more to go on if they relied on studies by sympathetic scholars who have   conducted important preliminary investi-gations in less developed areas (Boissevain 1996; Miller l994). Even herethough, they would have to recognize how their mode of analysis has tendedto keep them away from the bedrock of social life, a living environment whichinvolves interacting with socially influenced human beings having variousinterests, for whom projected ideas are only one aspect of their existence. A 

Dennison Nash: Department   of Anthropology, University   of Connecticut, Storrs

CT 06269-2176, USA. Email <dnash@uconnvm.uconn.edu>

REFERENCES

 Adams, K.1994 Come to Tara Toraja,   “Land of the Heavenly Kings”: Travel Agents as

Brokers in Ethnicity. Annals of Tourism Research 11:469–485.Boissevain, J., ed.

1996 Coping with Tourists: European Reactions to Mass Tourism. Providence:Berghahn Books.

Bruner, E.1991 Transformation of Self in Tourism. Annals of Tourism Research

18:238–250.Miller, D.

1997 Capitalism: An Ethnographic Approach. Oxford: Berg.Moeran, B.

1983 The Language of Japanese Tourism. Annals of Tourism Research10:93–108.

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469REJOINDERS AND COMMENTARY 

Nash, D.2003 New Wine in Old Bottles: An Adjustment of Priorities in the Anthropo-

logical Study of Tourism.   In  Qualitative Research on Tourism, L. Goodsonand J. Phillimore, eds. London: Routledge.

Reimer, G.

1990 Packaging Dreams: Canadian Tour Operators at Work. Annals of Tour-ism Research 17:501–512.Said, E.

1979 Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books.

Submitted 12 August 2003. Accepted 18 August 2003 

doi:10.1016/j.annals.2003.12.012

Annals of Tourism Research,  Vol. 31, No. 2, pp. 469–471, 2004©  2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.Printed in Great Britain

0160-7383/$30.00

The Context of Third World Tourism Marketing

Charlotte M. EchtnerUniversity of Mauritius, MauritiusPushkala Prasad

Skidmore College, USA

First and foremost, Dennison Nash is to be thanked for providing a com-ment on the recent article, “The Context of Third World Tourism Marketing”(Annals    30:660–682). Hopefully, this type of discussion can stimulateadditional thought among the readership and, ultimately, further criticalresearch in a rather neglected area of tourism marketing theory. Nash’s main

concerns with the research in question seem to hinge on two issues. First,there is a lack of  fieldwork resulting from a reliance on analyzing documentsand discourse; and, second, there is the troublesome recurrence of certainunderlying themes, despite what certain marketing experts seem to claimabout varying advertising strategies, niche markets, etc.

 With regard to the   first concern, it is somewhat puzzling to heed Nash’sadvice to leave the library and move into the field and, hence, the “real” worldof advertisers and market researchers. The data of the study were indeeddrawn from travel brochures which are cultural products of the  “real”  worldof advertising, and which are circulated among prospective tourists from the“real” world. The investigation was entirely focused on the implicit and explicit messages conveyed by those material texts. While it is certainly possible that an ethnographic study of market researchers could have provided a glimpseof their interests and concerns, it is dif ficult to see how this additional input  would have altered the “reality ”  of the underlying messages in the travel bro-chures. Furthermore, as   someone who has built an entire career on   con-ducting ethnographies   (Prasad 1997, Prasad and Prasad 1994, 2000), thesecond author would also like to observe that good ethnographers are always