T
he study using qualitative methods was carried out in the Häme region.The target group was selected especially among the rural tourism entre-preneurs in the Häme region, because it is presumable that they impact on the product development and in that way on destination marketing. The Häme region is one of the southernmost provinces of the district of The Thousand Lakes. The purposeful sampling was used to select the interviewees and to find the typical representatives of the practitioners (see Maxwell 1996: 71). There
were 21 entrepreneurs representing the regional rural tourism business, 3 in-formants from the hospitality industry, 1 entrepreneur representing a travel agen-cy, 4 informants represented the attractions providing various activities and 1 interviewee was from the tourist information service.
One open–ended question was used to encourage the respondents to ex-press themselves more freely. The idea was that the practitioners describe the concept of emotional experiences reflecting the perceived emotional experi-ences felt by the end-customers. The data were collected using interviews dur-ing June to December in 2002. When analysdur-ing the responses, first a concept map was formed following the interview transcripts, and second the categoriz-ing strategy called thematic analysis was used. The pre-established set of cate-gories following the definition and the framework presented above was ap-plied. The definition formed the level called the characteristic of the concept in this article. Strategic experiential models constitute the objectives and under-pinnings of marketing efforts (e.g. product development), and experience pro-viders are the tactical tools to achieve the goals. Even though the primary ob-jective of the qualitative research is not to generate frequency counts of the items in each category (see Maxwell 1996: 78), the frequencies are presented in Figure 1. for highlighting the most common categories mentioned in the responses.
Level 1. Characteristics of an emotional experience
Level 3. Experience providers as tactical implementation components
subjective concept (7) silent, positive (may be at
first negative),
FIGURE 1. The spontaneous ideas of strongly affecting incidents felt by the tourist, expressed by the tourism industry practitioners in Häme (the numbers in parentheses show the frequency).
The informants mentioned some items that have been categorized into a subjective concept and a holistic perspective on level one. Compared to the definition by Pine and Gilmore the findings of the study support the personal perspective and also the holistic standpoint presented by Schmitt. On level 2.
the categories of sense, feel, act and relate were mentioned. Interestingly, the main category measured by the frequency was the feel component. The find-ings support the previous definitions and a framework, which highlight the significance of feelings and emotions. There were no responses, which could have been suitable for the category of think on the strategic goal level. On the experience providers’ level, the product, the environment and the people cate-gories were mentioned by the interviewees. The environmental component is the second most common response in the study. This may also be an indication of the importance of interaction and a view of service-as-process. Nobody mentioned communications, identities, co-branding or Web sites on that level.
This could be due to the formulation of the question or some other reason.
Conclusions
T
he concept of an emotional experience is subjective and includes the interaction process with the personality of each tourist with various back-grounds, the setting and the properties of the tourism products provided. The feelings and the emotions are essential aspects in experiences and therefore it is more illustrating to use a term emotional experience to separate them from every day experiences. The results of the present research will shed light on the enhancement of customer-orientated research and especially the emotions in-volved in the consuming process. Research on emotional experiences without the customer’s perspective is insufficient.Based on the categorizing of practitioners’ responses the argument is that the presentation introduced by Schmitt highly focuses on the aspects of tangible products, not the emotional experiences. To see if the experiential grid is a feasible strategic planning tool and to benefit from it, the grid should be ap-plied more to the service environment and to highlight the characteristics of intangibles. In addition, the grid should be tested in practise to see the points, which need improvement. However, with the help of the framework, it is possi-ble to extend the breadth of the concept and to be one step further to contribute to the product development and destination marketing providing holistic emo-tional experiences in the tourism industry. The fact is that the competitive edge of the tourism companies is measured by the skills of innovation to refresh the range of products continually, to maintain demand and to add value to be profitable. As far as the emotional experiences are concerned, the innovations stemmed from the creativity related to the customer-experience relationship (Ridderstråle 2002) and further research knowledge is needed to be innova-tive. The real challenge for the tourism industry is to create the right psycholog-ical environment, in other words, to take care of the subjective personal
reac-tions and the feelings of tourists, not just to worry about technical things (Otto et al. 1996: 165).
Acknowledgements
I
would like to express my appreciation to Senior Lecturer Leena Öfversten, who kindly helped me revise the language of this article. I would also like to thank Tourism Co-ordinator Monna Alatalo in Traves and Information Spe-cialist Eija Räisänen for helping me with the data collection.Kirsi Hakkarainen Häme Polytehnic
kirsi.hakkarainen@hamk.fi
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