Implementation Mechanism and Paths Selection of Government's Tourism Marketing: An Exploratory Research Based on Grounded Theory.

As a public good, government's tourism marketing plays an important role in promoting national tourism images and tourism destinations. However, promotion level of Chinese tourist destinations is relatively low in terms of scientific and professional perspective, when comparing to other countries or other developed destinations. Therefore, it becomes a key issue to strengthen the scientific guidance of the government in tourism destination marketing and enhance the public marketing performance. This research adopts a grounded theory approach to explore the implementation mechanism and path selection of Chinese government's tourism marketing efforts. The annual reports of overseas offices of China National Tourism Administration were analyzed. The results showed that four main factors have significant effect on government's tourism marketing, including motivation, market investigation capacity, synergy capacity of external network, and environmental policy interventions. Motivation refers to factors that prompted the government to develop internal motive or desire of public marketing, such as market force, technology thrust and internal factors. Market research ability refers to the investigation capability, especially focuses on market entry, tourists' consumption habits and enterprises. It is mainly composed of research objects, research methods, research efforts, research subjects, research scope and other factors. External network coordinative ability refers to the ability of government coordinates and cooperates with other different stakeholders in the external networks, mainly composed of embedded type coordination, support collaboration, compact collaboration and interactive coordination. Environmental policy intervention refers to external factors that affect the public government tourist marketing, such as the annual tourism theme, tourism policies and regulations, international disputes, etc. By influencing market research capabilities and external networks to facilitate collaboration capabilities, Government's marketing motivation promote the conducting of marketing activities, hence it is the predisposing factor of government tourism marketing. Market research capabilities and external network interoperability are core factors influencing the ability of government marketing. Market research capabilities and external network interoperability are mediating variables (mediators), playing a significant role in influencing motivation on government tourism marketing. As a moderator, the variable of environmental policy interventions has an impact on the direction and strength of the relationship between "Motivation - Choice". Using the grounded theory approach, this research developed a theoretical model of the government tourism marketing mechanisms and path selection based on the logic of "motivation - context - ability - route choice model". The model continues the previous researches on the necessity of the government's public marketing, as well as fills the research gap with regard to the factors influencing government public tourism marketing. Moreover, this paper firstly introduces environmental public policy intervention into the tourism government marketing framework. As a standard tourism government marketing instrument, the framework could promote long-term effective marketing performance regardless of changes on destination marketing organization staff, advertising agency, other stakeholders and budget. This study contributes to the national or regional tourism destination marketing, and has practical significance for the government to formulate effective management policies in improving the performance of government's tourism marketing, and also provides a new perspective for theoretical study of destination marketing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]