Assessing the effectiveness of consumer narratives for destination marketing

Using tourists' stories to promote destinations is believed to be an innovative approach in destination marketing. This study conceptualizes and investigates the effectiveness of such an approach. This study supports the underlying premise of introducing narrative in marketing, that is, the narrative reasoning that human beings possess with which they can retrieve information better through a story. Furthermore, it is argued that the increased knowledge of a destination will have a stronger effect on the intention to visit a destination if the audiences can identify themselves with the story characters. Several managerial implications are also discussed.