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Abstract: This paper is intended to highlight the major role played by tourist brochures as important marketing tools. Not only do they depict a certain tourist destination but they also create powerful destination images with a decisive role in attracting and gaining the tourists' interest and confidence.
Keywords: tourist brochures, destination images, advertising
INTRODUCTION
Tourism can be included in the export industry. It is a commodity for sale, which is consumed at the point of production [4]. Tourism is growing fast as a global industry thus being the leading source of foreign exchange earnings. Due to the fact that tourism is one of the most flourishing industries nowadays, advertising in tourism, a significant component of the tourism marketing process, can hugely influence the audience's perception of a certain country, city or community.
Given the significant contribution of this industry and the highly competitive market of global tourism, many countries have been investing large amounts of resources into marketing activities to promote their resources and increase their incomes. With good marketing strategies and plans meant to create brands that will attract and gain tourists' confidence, tourism can be transformed into one of the most profitable industries. Needless to say good and persuasive advertising and marketing campaigns are required in order to attract customers and generate profit.
The aim of this paper is to highlight the importance of advertising and marketing campaigns in the domain of tourism. The main focus will be on tourist brochures as important sources of information and powerful tools of persuasion. After defining brochures and briefly describing their characteristics, the attention seeking devices found in brochures will be also brought under analysis. Due to the fact that brochures successfully combine text and images in their act of persuasion, multimodality will be also discussed, having as a starting point the works of the following scholars: Hiippala T. (2007, 2013), Francesconi S. (2014), Kress G. (2010) or Kress, G. &T. van Leeuwen (2006).
1. DEFINITIONS AND CHARACTERISTICS OF THE TOURIST BROCHURES
Tourist brochures are a form of print media advertising (Hiippalla 2013), they are part of the pre-travel materials intended to inform, convince, lure and eventually sell tourist packages. Brochures help travelers to make informed decisions (Andereck 2005) and the tour operators to better...