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Journal of Travel & Tourism Marketing

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The Impact of Social Media on the Consumer Decision

Process: Implications for Tourism Marketing
a a
Simon Hudson & Karen Thal
a
College of Hospitality, Retail and Sport Management, University of South Carolina,
Columbia, South Carolina, USA
Version of record first published: 04 Mar 2013.

To cite this article: Simon Hudson & Karen Thal (2013): The Impact of Social Media on the Consumer Decision Process:
Implications for Tourism Marketing, Journal of Travel & Tourism Marketing, 30:1-2, 156-160

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 Journal of Travel & Tourism Marketing, 30:156–160, 2013
Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN: 1054-8408 print / 1540-7306 online
DOI: 10.1080/10548408.2013.751276

THE IMPACT OF SOCIAL MEDIA ON THE

CONSUMER DECISION PROCESS: IMPLICATIONS
FOR TOURISM MARKETING
Simon Hudson
Karen Thal
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ABSTRACT. Social media have fundamentally changed the consumer decision process, and in the
last decade a more sophisticated view of how consumers engage with brands has emerged. This research
note describes this new consumer decision journey with examples from all sectors of the travel industry,
and describes how savvy tourism marketers are benefiting from social media engagement. Practical
and theoretical implications are discussed along with suggestions for further research in this rapidly
changing digital environment.

KEYWORDS. Social media, consumer decision journey, travel sector

INTRODUCTION LITERATURE REVIEW

Communication platforms provided through
social media have challenged basic assumptions
regarding the purchasing process. The consumer
decision journey is reevaluated here to highlight
the extent and implications of these changes for
travel and tourism marketing. In the past, mar-
keters assumed that consumers started with a
large number of potential brands in mind and
methodically narrowed their choices until they
had decided which one to buy. After purchase,
relationships with the brand typically focused on
the use of the product or service. With the advent
of social media, however, a more sophisticated
view of how consumers engage with brands has
emerged.
Court, Elzinga, Mulder, and Vetvik (2009)
have developed a model (see Figure 1) based
on a study of the purchase decisions of
nearly 20,000 consumers across five industries
and three continents. Their research revealed
that rather than systematically narrowing their
choices until they had decided what to buy, con-
sumers add and subtract brands from a group
under consideration during an extended eval-
uation stage. After purchase, they often enter
into self-initiated, protracted relationship with
the brand, sharing their experience with it online
through social media. The four stages of the
consumer decision journey are: (a) consider;
(b) evaluate; (c) buy; and (d) enjoy, advocate,

Simon Hudson and Karen Thal are in the College of Hospitality, Retail and Sport Management at the
University of South Carolina in Columbia, South Carolina, USA
The authors are grateful to the anonymous reviewers for offering valuable comments on an earlier version
of this article.
Address correspondence to: Simon Hudson, College of Hospitality, Retail and Sport Management,
University of South Carolina, The Coliseum, 701 Assembly Street, Columbia, SC 29208, USA (E-mail:
shudson@hrsm.sc.edu).

156
 Simon Hudson and Karen Thal
FIGURE 1. The Consumer Decision Journey Today (Based on Court et al., 2009)
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and bond. Social media make the “evaluate”
and “advocate” stages increasingly relevant. The
model has been modified in this research note to
recognize the importance of the “Zero Moment
of Truth” (ZMOT), a term recently coined to
describe the new reality where marketers have
to compete for shoppers’ attention online long
before a purchase decision is made (Lecinski,
2011).
So how are tourism marketers using social
media to engage with consumers throughout
this new consumer decision journey? At the
first “consider” stage, social media campaigns
are increasingly being used to drive traffic to
tourism websites (Tussyadiah & Fesenmaier,
2009). For example, in 2011, VisitBritain tar-
geted the Gen Y audience in the United States,
Canada, and Australia on Facebook through
its “Unite the Invite” campaign. Followers
of VisitBritain’s Facebook and Twitter pages,
called Love UK, were invited to register for a
Unite the Invite app. Each applicant was asked
to upload a picture of him or herself and they
were then sent the photo of another random
registrant, which they were asked to upload to
157
their Facebook wall and encourage Facebook
friends to share so that they could locate their
match on the social network. The fastest pair to
“unite their invite” each won a trip for two to
the United Kingdom. The campaign’s goal was
to drive traffic to the Love UK Facebook page,
where visitors would see digestible chunks of
interesting and quirky news about British cul-
ture. Twelve thousand people entered Unite the
Invite, and the Love UK Facebook page gained
25,000 fans during the campaign, according to
VisitBritain (Birkner, 2011).
At the next “evaluation” stage, consumer out-
reach to marketers and other sources of informa-
tion are much more likely to shape their ensu-
ing choices than marketers’ efforts to persuade
them. Companies are no longer the unrivaled
experts on the attributes or quality of brands
and products. Online reviews of hotels or cruise
lines, for example, play an important role during
the evaluation stage. Where they appear directly
on travel company websites, they represent an
opportunity for the company to address nega-
tive comments and mitigate the impact, while
positive reviews represent cost free, compelling
 158 JOURNAL OF TRAVEL & TOURISM MARKETING
advertising. Such customer-to-customer com-
munication also takes place indirectly on blogs
such as travelblog.org or review sites that link to
social media such as TripAdvisor.com. In fact,
blogging websites can be an effective tool to
reach consumers during this evaluation stage,
and consumer blogs have emerged as one of
the most prominent themes in research on social
media in travel and tourism (Pan, MacLaurin, &
Crotts, 2007).
Online brand communities can also be
influential at this evaluation stage. Brand
communities are defined as “specialized, non-
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geographically bound communities, based on
a structured set of social relationships among
admirers of a brand” (Bagozzi & Dholakia,
2006, p. 45). The emergence of brand communi-
ties has coincided with the growth in consumer
empowerment. They are venues where intense
brand loyalty is expressed and fostered, and
emotional connection with the brand forged in
customers. Research suggests that marketers
should employ a passive role when facilitating
brand communities (Algesheimer, Dholakia,
& Herrmann, 2005; Lee, Kim, & Kim, 2011).
A good example of this passive engagement in
a brand community is the Walt Disney World
Mom’s Panel. This is a forum where online
“Moms” answer questions and offer advice
about family vacations to Disney. The “Moms”
are selected to be panelists because they have
demonstrated an excellent knowledge of Disney
products.
For tourism marketers, the “buy” stage is
often likely to occur online, given that the travel
sector accounts for around a third of all global
e-commerce activity (Carey, Kang, & Zea,
2012). It has been suggested that companies
should avoid hard selling on social media sites
(Chan & Guillet, 2011), but for some tourism
organizations, social media platforms are fast
becoming more than a customer relationship
tool. Many hotels for example, now offer
room-booking technology on their Facebook
pages, which is leading to incremental sales
(Blank, 2011).
Interestingly, after purchase, a deeper brand
connection begins as the consumer interacts
with the product and with new online touch
points. For example, Court et al. (2009) found
that more than 60% of consumers with facial
skin care products conduct online research about
the products after purchase—a touch point not
entirely captured in traditional purchaser fun-
nel models of communication. Vail Resorts have
capitalized on this “enjoy, advocate, and bond”
stage with their new EpicMix social media cam-
paign for skiers. The idea of Vail’s EpicMix
is to track activity on and around the moun-
tain via radio frequency scanners installed at the
89 lifts across Vail, Beaver Creek, Breckenridge,
Keystone, and Heavenly. The scanners interact
with the RF-enabled chip embedded in sea-
son passes and daily tickets, listing lift rides,
vertical feet skied, and days on hill. Special
accomplishments—like clocking up 10,000 ver-
tical feet—are recognized with collectible dig-
ital pins, which can be instantly flaunted on
Facebook after downloading the EpicMix app.
One relatively new social media platform that
is helping tourism and hospitality businesses
engage with consumers in this enjoy, advocate,
and bond stage is the emergence of geo-location
sites such as Foursquare, Gowalla, and Loopt.
Foursquare encourages consumers to broadcast
their whereabouts (or “check-in”) in exchange
for discounts or coupons, etc. Dutch Airline
KLM used Foursquare as part of an innovative
social media campaign that focused on random
acts of kindness. When passengers checked in at
KLM’s Foursquare locations, the KLM Surprise
team used social networks such as LinkedIn,
Twitter, and Facebook to find out information
about the passenger. The KLM Surprise team
then used this information to come up with a
personalized gift to surprise the passenger with.
Other tourism organizations are using social
media at this final stage to respond to consumer
complaints. Southwest Airlines, for example,
which has 1.2 million Twitter followers, has
a team of 10 staff from communications and
customer relations that monitors the account
from 5 a.m. to 11.p.m., hours in which the air-
line operates (Holmes, 2011). Others are using
social media as an opportunity to gather insights
to drive continual incremental improvements
(Barwise & Meehan, 2010). For example, Virgin
Atlantic Airways (VAA), in response to online-
community suggestions, launched a system to
arrange taxi sharing on arrival with passengers
 Simon Hudson and Karen Thal
from the same flight. Fresh insights from social
media also reinforced the innovation aspect of
the brand. Facebook interactions helped the
company appreciate the extensive planning that
goes into a big trip, so the company launched
Vtravelled, a site dedicated to inspirational jour-
neys. Customers moderate the conversation and
exchange information, stories, and advise. The
site leads to some sales, but its main benefit to
VAA comes from brand reinforcement and new
customer insights.
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CONCLUSIONS
The application of the new consumer deci-
sion journey model to the tourism sector
shows that some tourism organizations like
VisitBritain, Disney, Vail Resorts, Virgin, and
KLM are embracing social media to good effect.
However, social media still accounts for less
than 1% of an average marketing budget (Divol,
Edelman, & Sarrazin, 2012), and research to
date suggests that the majority of tourism com-
panies are not engaging consumers in a mean-
ingful way using this platform (Chan & Guillet,
2011). Perhaps instead of focusing on how to
allocate spending across different media (tele-
vision, radio, online, etc.), tourism marketers
should target the various stages in the deci-
sion journey. A large proportion of the mar-
keting budget is usually spent on the “con-
sider” and “buy” stages, yet insight from this
research note suggests that consumers seem
to be influenced more during the “evaluation”
and “enjoy-advocate-bond” stages (Edelman,
2010). Marketing efforts, therefore, that help
consumers navigate the evaluation process and
then spread positive word of mouth about the
brands they choose can be as important as build-
ing awareness and driving purchases.
Those companies that do engage with con-
sumers on a consistent basis using social media
will find that such engagement can be used to
reinforce strength and durability for a brand,
and evidence is beginning to emerge that con-
firms a strong return on investment for com-
panies investing in social media (Dholakia &
Durham, 2010; Cruz & Mendelsohn, 2010).
However, such evidence is scarce, and more
159
research is needed generally to guide marketers
in a digital world. Research must adopt new
approaches to theory and method. Most of the
research about digital media deals with small
behavioral questions about online behavior and,
even then, the work is often quickly outdated.
Research on a deeper level, exploring consumer
responses to digital media is required. More
specifically, understanding the emotional and
behavioral responses of consumers to social
media will provide much needed insights that
will enhance marketing communications in the
months and years ahead. If researchers can iden-
tify exactly how, when, and where social media
influences consumers, it will help marketers
craft marketing strategies that take advantage
of social media’s unique ability to engage with
consumers (Divol et al., 2012).
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SUMITTED: April 30, 2012
FIRST REVISION SUMITTED:
August 1, 2012
FINAL REVISION SUMITTED:
September 23, 2012
ACCEPTED: October 3, 2012
REFEREED ANONYMOUSLY