''Where to go next?'' Dr. Irem Önder presents at the European Marketing Academy Conference

MU’s Dr. Irem Önder presented her recent work at the annual EMAC (European Marketing Academy) conference in Istanbul, Turkey from June 4-7, 2013. The European Marketing Academy is a ’’professional society for people involved in marketing theory and research ‘’, which publishes the International Journal of Research in Marketing in addition to the annual conference.

This year’s conference topic was ''Lost In Translation: Marketing In An Interconnected World'', attracting around 800 participants from all over the world.

According to 2013 EMAC Conference Chair Elif Karaosmanoglu, the impetus behind this theme is that “Economies are interconnected, and as in the butterfly effect there is a sensitive dependence on contextual factors. In order to eliminate the risk of mistranslation of the observed to actions, the use of marketing research to accumulate market intelligence should revise its conventional divide of quantitative and qualitative approaches. Rather, for building mechanisms to elicit interim feedback, both worlds should be reconciled towards breeding a collaborative expertise as to support cumulative learning.” 

In line with this topic, Dr. Önder’s research explored “Where to go next? Mapping Multi Destination Trips Using Geotagged Photographs“, which was written in collaboration with Wolfgang Körbitz from Vienna University of Economics. The research was made possible with the collaboration of Alexander Hubmann-Haidvogel from the department of New Media Technology at MU, who developed an application that made data collection possible for the research paper.  Presented within the Tourism Marketing track, her paper was well received by the assembled crowd of international academics.

The abstract of this paper is as follows:

Spotting multi-destination trips can be used for destination marketing to create potential marketing synergies. The purpose of this study is to identify multi destination trips in Austria based on the geotagged photos retrieved from the Flickr website. Based on this data, trip patterns were classified as follows: (1) Single destination trips (57%); (2) Base camp trips (30%) and (3) Regional Tour trips (13%). In addition, cluster analysis was conducted to categorize the cities. The first cluster encompasses the eastern part of the country, which includes larger cities such as Vienna and Salzburg and the second cluster refers to the western part of Austria. This can be used for practical purposes, for instance, the destinations which are in the same clusters can have joint marketing campaigns or create shared hiking trails.

Click here for a PDF of her entire presenatation!