Netnography and consumer behavior in tourism workshop will be offered by:
Professor Serena Lonardi
Serena Lonardi is an Assistant Professor at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano (Italy). She got a PhD in Management from the University of Innsbruck (Austria). She is interested in tourism marketing, socio-cultural sustainability in tourism, inner areas and minority languages in tourism. Lately, she has been focusing on getting an in-depth understanding of tourists’ online discourses and online behavior through netnography. Her works have been published in tourism journals like Annals of Tourism Research, Journal of Destination Marketing and Management and Journal of Heritage Tourism.
Workshop Details
Date: To be announced later
Time: To be announced later
Netnography to examine consumer behavior in tourism: an introduction
Netnography is a qualitative research method that uses online communities and social media platforms to study consumer behaviors and trends, offering valuable insights into consumer attitudes, preferences, and behaviors. This methodology is used in various disciplines, including tourism (e.g. Femeina-Serra et al., 2022; Kozinets & Gretzel, 2024; Mkono, 2020).
Netnography involves the systematic collection, analysis, and interpretation of data from online sources. This methodology includes the identification of relevant online communities and social media platforms where tourism-related discussions occur, followed with immersion in these virtual communities and the data collection.
The workshop will be divided into several interactive sessions that combine theoretical discussions with hands-on exercises. The workshop will begin with an introduction to netnography, providing an overview of its origins, principles, and applications, particularly in tourism research, with some examples where netnography has been successfully applied to tourism research. This helps participants identify which research questions and objectives can be addressed through netnography. Participants will then receive practical guidance on the main phases of netnographic research as developed by Kozinets (2019):
- Initiation phase: this is the first phase of netnography, where topics, operations and research questions are built.
- Investigation phase: this phase is dedicated to the identification and selection on online communities, where the immersion and data collection can take place.
- Immersion phase: this is the most important phase of netnographic research, in which researchers record thoughts, impressions, and observations to uncover new meanings and connections and to identify deep data. Special emphasis will be given to this phase and to its fundamental tool, i.e. the immersion journal.
- Interaction phase: in some cases, researchers need to interact with other actors to get an in-depth understanding of the phenomenon analyzed (it can be done through face-to-face interviews, commenting posts, online interviews, email exchanges, etc.). The possibility of triangulating the data collection will be discussed in the workshop.
- Integration phase: the workshop will also touch upon techniques for coding and analyzing qualitative data
- Incarnation phase: this phase has mainly to do with the representation and communication of findings and will be only briefly mentioned in the workshop.
Ethical considerations will be addressed through discussions on challenges and best practices in conducting netnographic research. Additionally, there will be group exercises to practice the identification of the community, data collection, coding, and analysis, culminating in lively discussions among the workshop participants.